Learning without boundaries?
The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (STLHE) 32nd annual conference — co-hosted by a consortium of Montreal post-secondary institutions including Concordia — is all about boundaries; analyzing them, redrawing them, breaking them down, or reinforcing them.
Does learning have boundaries? What boundaries do we have or need? Are boundaries productive? Constructive? Liberating? These are the sorts of questions the 650 educators and researchers from Canada, the United States and abroad will discuss during the four-day conference, organized under the theme Learning Without Boundaries?
“The conference is a wonderful opportunity for both faculty members and faculty developers to talk about what they’re doing, and to collaborate and develop partnerships with people from other universities,” says Olivia Rovinescu, director of Concordia’s Centre for Teaching and Learning Services (CTLS).
Rovinescu says members of the four institutions co-hosting the conference (Concordia, McGill University, Université de Montréal and Champlain College Saint-Lambert) worked hard to come up with a theme that would best represent the culture of post-secondary teaching and learning in Montreal.
She also said the organizers have made a strong effort to make this edition of the conference bilingual. “It has been predominantly an anglophone conference in the past and we’re trying to extend it to our francophone counterparts in the teaching world.”
Concordia is well represented on the program. On the first day, three Concordia researchers (Meral Büyükkurt, associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems, Ying Li, research assistant in CTLS, and Robert Cassidy from the Department of Psychology) will lead a workshop entitled Learning with Clickers: Integrating Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge.
Clickers are digital devices that allow students to key in answers to multiple-choice questions from their desks. Cassidy has been researching the benefits of using clickers to get students in his larger classes more engaged. “You can get students involved without relying on their level of confidence or ability to speak in front of a class,” he explains.
A series of concurrent sessions, the main component of the conference, begins on the second day. Among the presenters are 58 graduate students and professors from across Concordia, who will lead sessions on subjects as diverse as perceptions of technology use in higher education settings, to examining the benefits and challenges of multidisciplinary departments, to re-examining the benefits of group work. “This edition of the conference is celebrating student contributions,” Rovinescu says.
The STLHE is a national organization with over 1,000 members, including professionals, students and teachers. Its mission is to enhance teaching and learning in higher education, both in Canada and around the world. The current president of the STLHE is Arshad Ahmad, associate professor of Finance at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business.
The conference, which begins on Tuesday, June 19, is being held at the Centre Mont-Royal, a private conference centre.
Related links:
• The Society for Teaching and Learning (STLHE)
• STLHE Annual Conference
• Centre for Teaching and Learning Services
• Using Clickers (CTLS site)