collected essays on learning and teaching - volume 4

Editorial Board: Catherine Chiappetta Swanson,

Erin Allard, Erin Aspenlieder,

Jessica Raffoul, and Christopher Teeter

Volume VII, No 2 2014

Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching Learning to Live, Learning for Life

VOLUME VII, No 2

Editorial Board and Reviewers i A Message from the President of the STLHE

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2013 3M Student Fellows Feature Article - Exploring the Role of the University Student as an Experiential Learner: Thoughts and Reflections from the 2013 Cohort of 3M National Student Fellows Anita Acai, Victoria Cowan, Stephanie Doherty, Gaurav Sharma, & Naythrah Thevathasan

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2013 3M Student Fellows Feature Article - What is it “To Lead?”: A Nuanced Exploration of Leadership by 3M National Student Fellows Ameena Bajer-Koulack, Emerson Csorba, Kyuwon Rosa Lee, Brianna Smrke, & Tristan Smyth

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Engaging Undergraduates in Social Science Research: The Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan Project Loleen Berdahl

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Motivations for Going to University: A Qualitative Study and Class Project Heather Schmidt, Nicole Carocci, Chris Gardner, Alicia Serroul, & Megan Topalovic

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Inquiry Guided Learning Projects for the Development of Critical Thinking in the College Classroom: A Pilot Study Danielle C. Bentley

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The Impact of a Required Undergraduate Health and Wellness Course on Students’ Awareness and Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease Usha Kuruganti

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Learning Task Inventories (LTIs). Exploration of Optimal Conditions to Help Students Develop, Improve and Sustain Good Study and Learning Practices Stephen MacNeil, Eileen Wood, Lucia Zivcakova, Robyn Glover, & Patrick Smith

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“Place Based Tourism Curriculum: Making Connections to Community” Robin Reid

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Mix and Match: Promoting Interdisciplinary Teaching, Learning, and Community through Classroom-Level Partnerships Joanne A. Fox, Natalie Baloy, & Allen Sens

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From Teaching Assistant (TA) Training to Workplace Learning Cynthia Korpan

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A Multi-Perspective Examination of the Barriers to Field-Placement Experiences for Students with Disabilities Tara Flanagan, Fiona J. Benson, & Frederic Fovet

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CELT Volume VII Issue 2 Editorial Board

Catherine Chiappetta Swanson McMaster University Erin Allard McMaster University Erin Aspenlieder University of Guelph Jessica Raffoul University of Windsor Christopher Teeter McMaster University

Managing Editor Catherine Chiappetta Swanson McMaster University

Editorial Assistants Jennifer Faubert McMaster University Muriel McKay STLHE Patricia Raso McMaster University

CELT Volume VII Issue 2 Reviewers

Nicholas Baker University of Windsor

Amy Gullage McMaster University

Janette Barrington McMaster University

Shoshanah Jacobs University of Guelph

Danielle Bentley University of Toronto

Betsy Keating University of Windsor

Ken Cramer University of Windsor

Kris Knorr McMaster University

Stephanie Dayes OCAD University

Jamie Koroluk University of Ontario Institute for Technology

Katrina Faulkner University of Adelaide

Cynthia Korpan University of Victoria

Greg Van Gastel McMaster University

Tracey Penny Light University of Waterloo

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Ron Marken University of Saskatchewan

Lorie Stolarchuk University of Windsor

Genevieve Newton University of Guelph

Sandra Thompson McMaster University

Amy Pachai McMaster University

Lauren Wallar University of Guelph

Matt Pachai McMaster University

Kim West University of Saskatchewan

Allyson Skene University of Windsor

Natasha Wiebe University of Windsor

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June, 2014

We are delighted to share STLHE’s signature peer-reviewed publication Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching (CELT). CELT is aimed to appeal to a wide readership interested in improving teaching practices in post secondary education.

Volume 7 gives you twice the collection of essays! The first issue highlights the 2013 Alan Blizzard award winning paper and several other articles focused on faculty and educational development. This second issue highlights student voices including for the first time essays from the 2013 3M national student fellows as well as others focused on student interests. These wide-ranging essays are sure to resonate especially with STLHE members who missed the 2013 conference in Cape Breton and those who wish to take this work further.

CELT could not have been produced without the commitment and leadership of Catherine Chiappetta-Swanson, SLTHE Chair of Publications and her dedicated team, particularly Muriel McKay and Jennifer Faubert, as well as support from McMaster’s Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The Editorial team would sincerely like to thank Jessica Raffoul, from the University of Windsor who has been Managing Editor since the inception of CELT in 2008 for ensuring the transition to the next editorial team was a seamless one!

We look forward to feedback on areas worthy of further elaboration that would enrich CELT.

I am confident that CELT will serve as a catalyst for generative discussion and will encourage others to add their contributions.

Sincerely,

Arshad Ahmad, President, STLHE

Associate Vice-President, Teaching & Learning, McMaster University

3M National Teaching Fellow

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2013 3M Student Fellows Feature Article

Exploring the Role of the University Student as an Experiential Learner: Thoughts and Reflections from the

2013 Cohort of 3M National Student Fellows Anita Acai±, University of Guelph, Victoria Cowan±, University of Saskatchewan, Stephanie Doherty±, University of Northern British Columbia, Gaurav Sharma±, McGill University, Naythrah Thevathasan±, University of Guelph. ± Equal authorship.

Abstract In recent years, there has been a dynamic shift in the role of the university student through the creation and promotion of experiential learning opportunities on campuses across the country. Many post-secondary programs now include co-op placements, practicums, or internships where students can apply theoretical knowledge to real-world settings. However, in this article, we have chosen to focus on more “altruistic” forms of experiential learning – volunteerism, development work, and service-learning – which have gained increased focus in recent years but are often used, we feel, without appropriately reflecting on their meaning. In this article, we draw upon our experiences as student leaders to define each of these roles, outline what we see as the benefits of experiential learning for students, and provide recommendations for how these learning opportunities can continue to be improved. Moreover, we identify privilege, ethics, and responsibility as complexities related to experiential learning and discuss each of these topics in more detail. We end our discussion by addressing the role of experiential learning in helping to define the value of a post-secondary education.

Overview The five of us represent half of the 2013 cohort of 3M National Student Fellows, the second cohort to be recognized since the establishment of the awards program. It was an honour and a privilege to be given the opportunity to develop and share a concurrent session on June 20, 2013 at the 2013 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) conference concerning the role of the university student as a volunteer, development worker, and service-learner. This article is a combination of the thoughts, perspectives, and experiences discussed during our seminar, which we believe can be used as such opportunities continue to expand on campuses across the country. Given that our perspectives and experiences are varied, the statements in this article may reflect both individual and/or group opinions.

Introduction According to Jarvis et al. (1998), experiential learning is, “the process of creating and transforming experience into knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses” (p. 67) – or in short, learning through doing. In recent years, there has been a dynamic shift in the role of the university student through the creation and promotion of experiential learning opportunities on campuses across the country. Many post-secondary programs now include co-

Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 2014, Vol VII, No 2

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op placements, practicums, or internships where students can apply theoretical knowledge to real-world settings. Some institutions also offer specific for-credit courses that incorporate service-learning or community placements, while others have developed entire sets of not-for-credit opportunities that are based on experiential learning models.1 In 2012, the National Student Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) reported that on average, 40.1% of senior post-secondary students across 577 institutions in Canada and the US felt that their universities had provided them with learning opportunities beyond the classroom including, “internships and co-ops, community service, study abroad, and a campus environment that promotes contact among students from different backgrounds” (NSSE, 2012).

For students, experiential learning has particular incentive in today’s society where opportunities beyond post-secondary education, particularly in the realm of employment, have become increasingly competitive. A report from the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) emphasizes that students can no longer necessarily compete in the “real world” simply because they have a diploma or degree in-hand; instead, they must seek new ways of distinguishing themselves as individuals and developing soft skills that cannot exclusively be taught in a classroom (CCL, 2008). According to a survey conducted among employers in British Columbia, the top five skills that employers look for in new hires are interpersonal, teamwork, problem solving, communication, and leadership, all of which are considered to be soft skills (BCBC, 2006). Although the focus of experiential learning often tends to be on job preparedness, there are many other positive outcomes of experiential learning (Kolb & Kolb, 2005). For example, experiential learning can help students move beyond the simple repetition of facts and theories and instead learn about complex issues that have local or global relevance. By doing so, students become able to develop critical thinking skills, and in turn, shape their identities. Experiential learning also helps students become more directly engaged with the communities and the individuals that they are working with, creating an opportunity for more meaningful learning experiences (Kolb & Kolb, 2005).

Given the powerful benefits that can come from experiential learning, we predict that the prevalence of these opportunities will continue to increase across Canadian campuses. However, it is imperative that post-secondary institutions equip students with the proper knowledge and skills to navigate these roles so that they are of benefit to not only students, but also to the communities, groups, or individuals that they are working with. In this article, we reflect upon our own experiences as student leaders to address experiential learning from the perspective of current university students. We then propose ways in which these opportunities might be improved, discuss common experiential learning roles and related complexities, and address the role of experiential learning in helping to define the value of a post-secondary education.

Thoughts on Experiential Learning and Opportunities for Improvement I recently travelled to Costa Rica and Nicaragua with an organization called VIDA on a medical missions trip. I took this trip with two intentions in mind: to give back to those less fortunate, and to experience what life could be like if I chose a career in the medical field. During my trip, I learned basic medical techniques that I was able to put into practice during six clinic days. I was able to communicate with patients, conduct physical examinations, and watch how other medical professionals helped others. Although I am by no means a medical expert, this trip gave me

1 Several examples include, but are not limited to, the Peer Helper Program and Project Serve at the University of Guelph or Reading Week Projects at the University of British Columbia. In addition, many campuses also offer volunteer or work placements with community organizations or faculty research partners.


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insight into a realm that I would not have seen otherwise, and taught me things that no textbook could ever adequately explain. -Naythrah Thevathasan

Learning that happens through direct experience is often far more meaningful than that which is restricted to the four walls of a classroom. As student leaders, we have each benefited from experiential learning opportunities in numerous ways. For example, those of us who have completed co-op placements or internships have found that we are more competitive in the job market after graduation and have a clearer idea of our career aspirations than our peers who have not yet worked in their field of study. Others of us have found that experiential learning has helped to develop our critical thinking skills and kept us more engaged with our studies, allowing us to better understand the relevance of our post-secondary education.

Our roles as experiential learners have also allowed us to identify areas where such learning opportunities could be further developed or improved. One such area is the accessibility of experiential learning opportunities to a broad range of students. Though some experiential learning opportunities may be counted towards students’ academic requirements, many are extracurricular in nature. This means that some of these opportunities may require a considerable amount of scheduling flexibility and financial resources, so students in highly rigorous or specialized academic disciplines or those without the necessary financial resources may be at a disadvantage. Thus, there is value in having some experiential learning opportunities that are for-credit in disciplines that tend to be more theoretical or conceptual such as the core sciences and economics.2

To more formally recognize students who have participated in experiential learning, many institutions have implemented the use of co-curricular transcripts. These are formal, institutionally-issued documents similar to an academic transcript, but instead recognizing learning opportunities that help students develop a specific set of skills. Co-curricular transcripts can “encourage and incentivize engagement … by help[ing] students find and track experiences beyond the classroom, link those experiences to competencies, and validate those experiences on an official institutional document (Elias and Drea, 2013). However, in our experience, co-curricular transcripts often do not capture many activities that would otherwise serve as useful development opportunities. They are also not frequently recognized outside the realm of academia, for example by employers. Thus, post-secondary institutions should more thoroughly assess the types of opportunities that are recognized on co-curricular transcripts and determine if more opportunities could be recognized, or if perhaps recognition could occur in other forms such as teaching students how to “market” the skills that they have acquired through various learning opportunities more effectively. In addition, efforts should be made to connect with employers to identify what factors influence hiring decisions, and how co-curricular transcripts might be made useful in hiring processes.

We also believe that experiential learning without critical reflection is neither useful nor enlightening. Indeed, according to Kolb and Kolb (2005), “learning is best facilitated by a process that draws out the students’ beliefs and ideas about a topic so that they can be examined, tested, and integrated with new, more refined ideas” (p. 205). Experiential learning opportunities can easily be used as a means to fill the pages of a resume without really contributing to

2 An example of such a course is Civic Engagement & Service-Learning (UNIV*3000) at the University of Guelph. In this course, “students … develop civic leadership skills and increase their awareness and appreciation for the social relevance of higher education through a community service-learning experience … Students will conduct research and seminars on a selected topic while simultaneously completing a placement in a community agency appropriate to that topic” (University of Guelph, 2013).


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students’ learning. At times, these opportunities can also be overwhelming for students, leading them to become paralyzed by the challenges and complexities that they have experienced. The process of critical reflection involves critiquing the presumptions on which beliefs have been built and evaluating the validity of one’s understanding of a particular subject in a given context (Meizrow, 1990). Thus, critical reflection enables students to ask important “why” questions that will help them to challenge presumptions and beliefs, and ultimately, lead to transformative learning.

The timing of critical reflection is also important. Not only should students engage in critical reflection before and during experiential learning, but they should also do so after their learning experience is over, a step that in our experience is often forgotten. According to the Kolb Learning Cycle (1984), a widely used model of experiential learning, a final and important step of experiential learning is the translation of new conceptual understanding into “actionable” knowledge that can be applied to and used toward new experiences. Thus, it becomes important, particularly in the case of trips abroad, to encourage students to use experiential learning opportunities not only as for their own betterment, but also for the betterment of the local communities to which they are returning. Moreover, students returning home from communities that are very different from home can experience a "reverse culture shock”; thus, forums for discussion and reflection that promote critical thought serve as useful venues for students to deconstruct their experiences.

Types of Experiential Learning Opportunities and Related Complexities: Privilege, Ethics, and Responsibility Experiential learning opportunities encompass numerous student roles and activities. In this section, we will focus on more “altruistic” forms of experiential learning – volunteerism, development work, and service-learning– although we recognize that experiential learning also encompasses roles such as internships and co-op placements that prepare students for a range of career options following graduation. The terms that we have selected have gained increased focus in recent years, but are often used, we feel, without appropriately reflecting on their meaning. Based on our own experiences and reflections, we propose the following definitions and descriptions of these terms:

Volunteer An individual who provides service to others with no tangible reward or benefit. Volunteer opportunities exist both within post-secondary institutions and in the broader community, and may be done on an individual level or part of an organized program.

Development Worker An individual who is both a leader and a pioneer, implementing new solutions to existing problems in their local or global community. Critical to being a good development worker is the ability to understand, respect, and incorporate the unique needs and challenges of the communities being served, and the ability to embrace the vision of a global community while working to make broader connections between local and global issues.

Service-Learner An individual who learns through engagement in and observation of a community within its existing framework. A good service-learner participates in the direct exchange and creation of


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knowledge and experience at a given community service placement, which in some institutions may be connected to university courses taken for credit. Though we have defined them separately, we acknowledge that these terms can often blend together within different experiences. For example, several of us have travelled abroad as part of programs that were not explicitly labelled as either “development work” or “service-learning”, and were perhaps a mixture of both roles.

In our reflections, we have also identified three areas of complexity that pertain to each of these roles: privilege, ethics, and responsibility. These are areas that we feel both students and post-secondary students should be especially aware of and critically engaged with. In the coming sections, we will address each of these subjects and related complexities through personal experiences and views, and provide suggestions for how post-secondary institutions can better equip students to take on roles as volunteers, development workers, and service-learners.

Privilege Through volunteering and service-learning, I’ve had the opportunity to learn and teach about different types of social mobility and privilege. Most of my experiences and learning have helped me develop an eye for recognizing situations where someone had abused their social privilege and how to call it out. However, I was never taught how to react to having my own privileges revealed. This resulted in feeling deflated and useless when I was told that using the phrase “screw that” was perpetuating rape culture through normalizing sexual violence. While service learners, development workers, and volunteers seem to be in a race to do good, I wish we were taught how to deal with being wrong. One of the benefits of experiential learning is the flexibility to make mistakes, and being vulnerable to that was one of my best lessons about privilege. -Gaurav Sharma

Students with access to post-secondary education have considerable privilege that includes, but is not limited to, social mobility and capital. This at times can both enhance and hinder the roles that we take on as university students. Inability to realize privilege can be a liability to building relationships through misrepresenting the thoughts or interests of a marginalized group, or by the perpetuation of prejudice and oppression, albeit unintentionally. Students, especially those in leadership positions, can also often feel burdened by the idea of privilege – for example, many of us have questioned why we are more deserving of an education or opportunities in life than someone else. In these situations, we have become empowered through becoming aware of our privileges, and using them for positive change by creating opportunities for others where they previously did not exist. We have learned that while formal education is indeed a privilege, learning does not have to be restricted to institutes of higher education. Learning opportunities for others can and should be created wherever possible. A goal of post-secondary institutions should be to teach students that they can use skills acquired through higher education to help others who may have less privilege.

Having privilege requires that students be aware of its impact and using it in solidarity with those who do not have it. However, some students may not be aware of the privileges they possess, or do not react constructively when others point out their privileges. For example, in a study by Ancis and Szymanski (2001), about 30% of White students studying counselling had a “lack of awareness and denial of White privilege” (p. 554). A refusal to acknowledge privilege is perhaps the most destructive for students who are working with marginalized groups or individuals. It is important for students to become educated not only about the privileges that they possess, but also how to use them for affirmative action where needed. Furthermore, it is


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also critical that students learn to react constructively in situations where others point out their privileges. This is possible through self-reflection, which can help students to acknowledge the personal role(s) that they may play in oppression. Teaching privilege without encouraging students to be critical of it is not a very useful lesson. However, when students are given the tools to assess privilege, they can become both empowered and better aware of the power they possess.

Ethics As part of my service-learning [teaching creative writing in a jail], I edited a publication of inmate writing, which meant that I was responsible for (mis)representing inmates’ voices and identities to the “outside world.” I was compelled to be aware of not only the power inherent in my role as an editor, but also in my position as a community service-learning student and as a university student, which influenced my approaches to editing. My ability to edit came from my general cooperation with the dominant education system, and in my role, I was imposing the standards of the same education system that often represents disappointment and failure for inmates’ authorial voices. -Victoria Cowan

Universities are oftentimes viewed as ethical institutions; however, deciphering what our moral obligations are as students, particularly within the various roles that we may have, can prove challenging. Indeed, embedded understandings of power and privilege are just one set of challenges that require students’ careful attention and negotiation in experiential learning opportunities. As Himley (2004) notes, experiential learning encounters such as community service-learning are “agitated, producing surprise and conflict, because any particular encounter between embodied subjects is always already framed by broader relations of power” (p. 418). Thus, it is important, arguably essential, for students to have a working understanding of ethics when partaking in volunteerism, development work, and service-learning. To us, ethics means working to understand, navigate, and mediate the workings and forms of power (and oppression) in and across environments and relationships. Ethics also encompasses the strength and initiative to adhere to a strong moral code that considers both individual and collective impact. When university students volunteer or engage in development work or service-learning, ethical boundaries can sometimes become blurred. University students may get lost in the struggle to become well-rounded scholars (i.e., better themselves), and lose sight of the altruistic motives behind the service they are providing and of the collective group in need. This can be a deterrent to groups who welcome students into their communities because ethics are integral in partnerships and convey a sense of respect, humanity, and good citizenship. As well, because students in these situations are, as Himley points out, “typically the ones who can and do cross borders, the ones who are mobile and accrue cultural capital through that mobility” (p. 425), it is necessary for them to recognize and take responsibility for their privilege in this respect with ethical actions and conduct.

From our perspective, ethical instruction should be practical, for example facilitating discussion on how students might govern themselves in a variety of difficult situations where ethical boundaries may be unclear. During ethical instruction, students should be encouraged to critically reflect on situations and roles on a regular basis.3 The effects of students’ actions

3 In many of our leadership roles, this type of training has been accomplished through the use of case studies or role-playing scenarios. It is most effective if these activities are based on real situations that could be encountered in a particular leadership role.


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should be considered in relation to not only themselves but, moreover, in relation to the individuals that they are working with as well. Personal limitations should be acknowledged, since acting beyond capacity or ability can have detrimental effects on not only the student, but also the community that they are working with. However, students who believe that they are very familiar with a particular topic or community should still exercise caution and humility to ensure that the voices of those they are working with are not diminished. Thus, there must always be a subtle ebb and flow between critical thought, reflection, and action.

Responsibility With Prince George Public Interest Research group, I was closely involved in the planning and research needed to develop an upgraded compost system at UNBC. I did a lot of the “dirty work,” carting compost from one side of campus to the next. I found that the response I got from my peers was that they appreciated the work and thought it was necessary. They recognized that volunteering in this manner was good, but decided they didn’t have time to contribute. When did we decide that someone else should be responsible for our waste, whether that someone is alive today or part of a future generation? This is just a tiny bite of the issue, but it shows that as students we need to start taking responsibility for ourselves and the impact we have on others. -Stephanie Doherty

The concept of responsibility is inextricably linked to experiential learning. Educators typically place focus on ensuring that students recognize the responsibilities that exist within their experiential learning – for example, listening to and learning about the culture of a community, or being aware of privilege and being mindful of how it can be navigated. However, it is also important to recognize that having a sense of responsibility is also important in students’ decision to take on a leadership role in their local or global community in the first place. It may be a struggle for some university students to realize the responsibility they have to themselves, their community, and their academic institution. Some students have a sense of innate responsibility to make the most of a higher education and be of service to others, whereas others do not. This creates a dichotomy where some students do so much that it becomes nearly overwhelming for them, whereas others navigate the world with a sense of disconnect and complacency. The goal of a post-secondary education should be to teach students to develop a sense of responsibility for the world around them and to challenge them to act on this responsibility. Part of issuing this challenge comes from incorporating, teaching, and practising self-awareness and critical reflection in higher education so that students feel a greater sense of ownership over their lives. This is something that can be taught only through practice, but it is integral to the distribution of responsibility of many in order to create and perpetuate sustainable leadership.

When teaching responsibility, the focus is far too often on the individual. According to Westheimer and Kahne (2004), “educators who seek to teach personally responsible citizenship and researchers who study their programs focus on individual acts of compassion and kindness, not on collective social action and the pursuit of social justice” (p. 244). One person alone cannot solve complex problems; however, many people working together have significantly more power to create change. Working together also helps break large tasks into more manageable chunks, allowing students to feel less overwhelmed with what needs to be done. Different students may have different motives for getting involved; however, it is critical that the focus be not on individual motives, but on collective action. As Batson, Ahmad, and Tsang (2002) state, “the potential for the greatest good may come from strategies that orchestrate motives [for community


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involvement] so that the strengths of one can overcome weaknesses of another” (p. 441-42). As a result, it becomes evident that the teaching of responsibility must not only focus on the individual, but also how they fit into a collective community.

The Role of Experiential Learning in the Relevance of a Post-‐Secondary Education One of my recent volunteer experiences involved helping adult learners develop basic literacy skills that would help them be more independent and better function in our society. Most of the learners had not completed their high school education and faced significant barriers to their learning – poverty, addiction, or mental health issues. In my role, I found it immensely challenging to teach these learners basic skills such as reading, writing, or how to count money. I often caught myself thinking: “I am about to finish a five-year Bachelor of Science degree. I have almost two decades of educational experience – why am I finding it so difficult to teach others skills that I take for granted?” Part of me always came back to thinking about what we really learn in university. Are we just learning facts and theories, or can we actually use what we learn to help better our local and global communities? -Anita Acai

Universities are unique in their transience, meaning that they have the opportunity to influence a very large, diverse, and constantly changing community. In the context of higher education, experiential learning presents immense opportunities for future leaders and change-makers. In fact, it is one of the primary reasons that we feel that our own education has been of value. In a time where the relevance of a higher education has often been called into question, post-secondary institutions should champion the availability of these opportunities, and their importance in raising awareness about local and global struggles, bettering students’ understanding about what contributes to these struggles, encouraging students to make connections between local issues and global manifestations (and vice versa), and providing the mental and physical space to think critically about these issues and envision alternatives.

Universities should continue to foster community engagement and most importantly, to enable students to think critically about the issues that are prevalent in the community. This should not only be done via extracurricular activities, but in classrooms too. We have found ourselves most engaged in classes where we were able to discover, understand, discuss, debate, research, and teach others about issues, themes, and challenges that exist in our world and have relevance (or could have relevance) to us and our communities today. There is room for post-secondary institutions to form more community partnerships, which allow for the more direct transfer of student resources to communities and of community-based learning to students (Saltmarsh, Giles Jr., Ward, & Gaglione, 2009). Community-engaged scholarship can strengthen faculty and student engagement with local, national, and international communities of interest, and train faculty and students in knowledge mobilization. Oftentimes, community organizations do not have the capacity to acquire or interpret the latest scholarly research; thus, there is room for faculty and students to work with these organizations to fill mutual research needs (Saltmarsh et al., 2009).4 Universities also have the capacity to promote and support both small and large-scale events where students can volunteer to assist a community organization either directly by

4 The Research Shop at the University of Guelph “serves as a portal between community and university research needs. Faculty and students work with community organizations and individuals to identify and address social problems, and develop policies for positive change” (University of Guelph, 2014).


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filling a particular service role within the organization, or indirectly by helping to create or acquire the resources that are needed to meet organizational needs. Conclusion Through experiential learning opportunities, universities provide an environment that contributes to the development of the “holistic scholar,” one that is not only engaged with their studies, but also the local and global community. However, such opportunities are only truly enriching if there are proper tools in place to help students navigate them. To summarize the main messages that we wish to impart, we believe that experiential learning opportunities should: • 1) Continue to be encouraged, supported, and validated by post-secondary institutions with

the belief that they can contribute to helping students become balanced individuals who have a holistic understanding of the world through learning both inside and outside the classroom;

• 2) Become a formal requirement of more academic programs, particularly those with a heavy theoretical component or rigorous academic requirements that might otherwise prevent student engagement outside of the classroom. This can be done through the creation of experiential learning opportunities for credit and/or the transformation of the classroom into a forum for discussing and validating student’s prior experiences;

• 3) Be seen as important not only in helping to shape students’ career paths and making them more competitive upon graduation, but also (and much more importantly) in helping to shape students’ identities, characters, and fostering good citizenship;

• 4) Involve teaching and encouraging students to critically reflect upon the role(s) that they are taking on before, during, and after any experiential learning experiences. Students should be given a forum in which they can learn about whom they will be working with, voice unease, ask questions, and deconstruct experiences of power and privilege.

As we move forward, we feel that it is imperative to emphasize the need for a platform of discussion between educators and university students to help students ask questions, voice thoughts and feelings, and reflect upon the roles that they are taking on. It is important for academic institutions to continually discuss how they can better support students as current pedagogy broadens to include experiential learning. We wish to leave you with the following questions to aid in this ongoing dialogue in the future:

• How might we structure experiential learning opportunities so that the benefits outweigh the costs both financially and otherwise?

• How might we help students who have privilege become empowered to use it to create positive change where it is needed?

• How can we encourage students to understand, navigate, and mediate the forms and workings of power and to effect change where needed?

• How might we help students feel a greater sense of responsibility toward themselves, their institutions, and most importantly, the communities in which they live?

• How might universities ensure that students leave with an education that will help them not only with personal goals, but also the tools and skills needed to contribute to the betterment of both the local and global community?

Acknowledgements


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We are incredibly grateful to those who made the 3M National Student Fellowship possible and contributed a large amount of time and effort. In particular, we extend our sincere thanks to members of the Coordination Team: Alice Cassidy, Natalie Gerum, Valerie Lopes, Mandy Frake-Mistak, Laura Goldstein, Barbara Kerr, Kari Marken, and Shannon Murray. Special thanks to Natalie and Kari for their expert help and guidance with developing our concurrent sessions and conference plenary. We are also grateful to the 2013 team of adjudicators, as well as Arshad Ahmad, Angie Kolen, Sylvia Avery, Muriel McKay, Sean Conley, Elizabeth Wells, and Ron Marken. Special thanks to Greg Snow and 3M Canada for your generous contributions to the program and everyone at Cape Breton University for their organization and hospitality. We also extend thanks to the CELT Editorial Team, two anonymous reviewers, and Lenore Latta from the University of Guelph. And finally, to our dedicated friends and family, thank you for being there for us every step of the way – we wouldn’t be us without you.

Biographies The 3M National Student Fellowship Award was introduced in 2012 to honour undergraduate students in Canada who have demonstrated qualities of outstanding leadership and who embrace a vision where the quality of their educational experience can be enhanced in academia and beyond. Read the full bios of the second cohort at http://www.stlhe.ca/awards/3m-national-student-fellowships/2013-2/2013-recipients/.

References

Ancis, J. R., & Szymanski, D. M. (2001). Awareness of white privilege among white counseling trainees. The Counseling Psychologist, 29(4), 548-569.

Batson, C. D., Ahmad, N., & Tsang, J. (2002).Four motives for community involvement. Journal of Social Issues, 58(3), 429-445.

Business Council of British Columbia (BCBC). (2006). Biennial skills and attributes survey report: What are BC employers looking for? Vancouver: BCBC.

Canadian Council on Learning (CCL). (2008). The benefits of experiential learning. Ottawa: CCL.

Elias, K., & Drea, C. (2013). The co-curricular record: Enhancing a post-secondary education. College Quarterly, 16(1).

Himley, M. (2004).Facing (up to) 'the stranger' in community service learning. College Composition and Communication, 55(3), 416-438.

Jarvis, P., Holford, J., & Griffin, C. (Eds.). (2003). The theory and practice of learning (2nd ed.). London, England: Routledge.

Kolb, A. Y., & Kolb, D. A. (2005). Learning styles and learning spaces: Experiential learning in higher education. Academy Management Learning & Education, 4(2), 193-212.


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Kolb, D. A. (1984).Experiential learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.

Meizrow, J. (1990). How critical reflection triggers transformative learning. In J. Meizrow (Ed.), Fostering critical reflection in adulthood (pp. 1-20). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). (2012). Survey results: Enriching educational experience. Retrieved from http://www.questu.ca/images/nsse/NSSE%20%20Enriching%20Educational%20Experience.png

Saltmarsh, J., Giles Jr., D.E., Ward, E., &Buglione, S.M. Rewarding community-engaged scholarship.New Directions for Higher Education, 2009(147), 25-35.

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Westheimer, J., &Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? the politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237-269.


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2013 3M Student Fellows Feature Article

What is it “To Lead?”: A Nuanced Exploration of Leadership by 3M National Student Fellows

Ameena Bajer-Koulack*, University of Manitoba Emerson Csorba*, University of Alberta Kyuwon Rosa Lee*, McMaster University Brianna Smrke*, McMaster University Tristan Smyth*, Mount Royal University

*Equal authorship

Abstract

In Canadian higher education, students from across the world interact within tight-knit communities, sharing ideas and developing a wealth of soft and disciplinary skills. With many universities playing host to dozens if not hundreds of student groups, the word “leadership” is uttered by students and faculty in hallways, gymnasiums, outdoors areas and of course, student group meeting rooms. On June 20, 2013, five members of the 2013 3M National Student Fellowship cohort explored the term “leadership,” sharing their personal experiences and observations with Canadian faculty members in a Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) workshop. This paper explores the conversations and ideas inspired by the group’s pre-STLHE online discussions and the current emphasis on leadership in Canadian higher education.

Introduction

From June 19 to June 22, 2013, the second annual cohort of 3M National Student Fellows assembled in Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) conference. On a chilly evening in Sydney, emerging leaders from McMaster, Mount Royal, University of Northern British Columbia and other schools, assembled and for what became an unforgettable weekend. The ten 3M National Student Fellows capitalized on the conference energy, developing an impressive team chemistry.

On June 20, 2013, five Student Fellows facilitated a workshop on campus leadership, seeking to discuss and redefine the term. Considering the National Student Fellowship’s emphasis on “honour[ing] undergraduate students in Canada who have demonstrated qualities of outstanding leadership and who embrace a vision where the quality of their educational experience can be enhanced in academia and beyond”, the topic was altogether appropriate. The vast majority of 3M students came with experience, drawing on previous representatives in university research and student government programs. Yet, the four days at CBU were transformative. This paper documents the transformation of


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the 3M students’ perspectives toward the word “leadership,” through an analysis of the Canadian higher education environment and a selection of 3M student personal stories. Leadership as a Dirty Word Ameena, Emerson, Rosa, Brianna and Tristan entered the conference with surprisingly hostile feelings about the word leadership. This was evident from the group’s initial online interactions, via Google documents. In preconference online discussions, a student admitted;

“I hate the word leadership. For me, it conjures images of cheering high schoolers, bad PowerPoints and ‘action plans.’ Maybe that’s because it’s a noun and seems to refer to something ‘out there,’ something that some people can possess and others cannot.”

Another 3M student wrote;

“Many of the so called “leaders” I encounter often neglect that oh so important concept of leading: directing a group of people to fulfill some sort of initiative. Of course, that is a rather finite way of interpreting an amorphous idea, but to me, that is the gist of the leading. Frankly, I despise the solo-leader, the strong-headed person who drags the group in the direction they want to go.”

These shared frustrations allowed for genuine dialogue. Throughout the conference, small groups of attendees, moderated by the students, discussed themes such as “age and leadership,” “compassion and leadership,” and “leaders as aggressive shepherds.” Leadership in Canadian Higher Education Why is campus leadership a worthy topic for discussion? Dr. Ronald Barnett of the University of London argues the university is no longer the sole producer of knowledge within society. Facing unexpected competition from corporations and open-access learning resources, it must justify receiving shrinking public funds (Barnett, 2000). This intense public scrutiny not surprisingly encourages universities to further emphasize campus leadership programmes and certificates, study abroad opportunities, internships and student group offerings. Many of these programs are attempts to measure and perhaps even commodify leadership. This leads educational leaders to quantify leadership, questioning its viability. In the following sections, 3M Student Fellows attempt to weave together these leadership reflections.


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An Analysis of STLHE Leadership Workshop Themes Age and Leadership By Emerson Csorba, University of Alberta Prior to the June 21, 2013 workshop, I often considered the drawbacks and advantages of being a young person in higher education leadership roles. As a former Students’ Union Vice-President Academic, I served on committees and boards comprised primarily of professors and administrators; there were only one or two student voices, at most. This was also true as a community league president, where I chaired a board comprised of executives two or three times my age. Despite the comparative lack of experience, the young representatives often presented themselves competently, contributing meaningfully to discussions. Several years later, at the STLHE workshop, this discussion was reignited. I initially planned to gauge the conference attendees’ views on age and leadership. The first discussion involved a significant amount of listening, as I served as the moderator and ensured the conversation remained on track. The second group was more dynamic, with the conversation flowing quite naturally. Despite the time limitations, the discussions were fruitful and illuminating. One of the memorable moments from the opening discussion involved a professor describing an academic curriculum reform project championed by an undergraduate. This student successfully infused board-room tables with youth perspectives, guiding the university through a complex process. Similar sentiments were echoed when discussants articulated that many people discount young leaders based on their age. Thus, this Ontario student’s success in coordinating university-wide discussions is an outlier example; it is not what we expect out of undergraduate-level students. As a young person, I prepare vigorously for most meetings. Though this is a good habit for any person, I question whether this intensity fosters more anxiety than openness in group settings. It is because of this that intergenerational understanding is paramount; that is, engaging in dialogues based on respect regardless of age and individuals’ unique life experiences. Call me anything but a “Leader” By Brianna Smrke, McMaster University I have a confession. I was the student who admitted she hated the word “leadership.” I still do. As I said in the workshop, when it comes up in conversation, I think of a “flabby, bloated ball of taupe.” I think the word is used too hastily, too narrowly and too often. I will also confess that coming into the workshop I had grown cynical not only about the word “leadership”


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but the practice of the idea that anchors the word. I was in a ‘post-leadership’ state of mind. The workshop attendees questioned our mindsets with grace and care. Indeed, there richness, nuance and even beauty remain in the ability to tap into a group’s potential. It was conference participants’ examples – explicit, focused and clear stories – that led me to this realization. We are all leaders, so there are no leaders. Thus, the “word” leadership is dead, though the practice is not. There are storytellers, accountants, writers, listeners, animators and human beings. Instead of crafting a definition bland enough to be palatable to everyone, we should recognize others’ authenticity and genuine contributions. Magic sometimes happens when we assemble and solve problems together. Breaking this magic into tangible actions and roles might be a more inclusive and sustainable practice than branding a chosen few as “leaders.” I challenge you to be more precise with your language. If I see that someone can convince others that a better world is possible, I will not call them a leader. Instead, I will say they are an expert storyteller. If someone is able to manage and keep a meeting on course, I will think of them as a shepherd. I will not hide behind words I cannot fully define; words that will slip through my fingers were I to try to grasp them. The Aggressive Shepherd By Tristan Smyth, Mount Royal University I like aggressiveness, which is not to say my default setting is aggression. By and large, aggression and its many permutations have been besmirched. We think of it as an attribute of Hitler or Stalin – forceful, offensive, dictatorial, and militant people – and never the trait of a good leader. I contend it is worthwhile; we focus on the first dictionary entry and fail to read further. Aggression is a drive to succeed, to be filled with energy, to be bold and assertive. Aggression, as a positive characteristic, needs to be reclaimed. Therefore, I wish to propose an idea: the aggressive shepherd. While this is a startling juxtaposition, it marries my two favourite traits of a leader. The iconic shepherd frolics on a bucolic hillside while plucking a lyre and guarding a flock of white puffs of sheep. We could easily imagine Giorgione, Nicolas Poussin, or Thomas Cole painting this scene. However, none of that description is inherently relevant to leadership; it is as much divorced from good leadership as aggression is. Yet, together these words strike a different note. A shepherd is one who tends to the well-being of the sheep and makes decisions to benefit all, thus allowing sheep to prosper and produce wool (and occasionally meat, but that is a rather morbid train of thought). Our most immediate example of the aggressive shepherd is the sheepdog. “Aggressive shepherding” is a service function. It is a person who guarantees the group is productive, even if it requires forceful guidance. These individuals ensure every group member reaches their destination through the dynamism of tempered aggression –


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drive, energy and boldness. Thinking back to the example, sheepdogs are assertive to the flock and aggressive to foes. In short, this leadership requires being aggressive on behalf of the team and not to the team. Why, not who, lead? By Kyuwon Rosa Lee, McMaster University The 2013 STHLE conference was unique by many accounts. Indeed, I met countless leaders, each enhancing the room’s diversity. Whereas some attendees’ natural presence grabbed a room’s attention, others’ shined through their elegance, intellect and insights. United by the common goal of enhancing postsecondary education, attendees stood together regardless of the challenges they each face in their own schools and fields. At prima facie, leadership is too often defined by traditional images and qualities: the charismatic and aggressive shepherd with a strong voice. My conference experience, however, contradicts this. I realized the key commonality shared by the group is the raison d’être of leadership; that is, why we lead. This driving force is often neglected or forgotten in conversations about leadership. Leaders are not innately different than everyone else. There is no genetic predisposition to becoming a leader. Leaders are simply those fortunate enough to discover their personal raison d’être of leadership, likely because of auspicious circumstances, tools and supports. With this in mind, I propose we bring more nuance to leadership, considering the “purpose of leadership” rather than the individual leader. In addressing this shift, I conclude with several lingering questions. First, how can we encourage individuals to reflect on their motivations for leadership? More specifically, how can postsecondary education serve as a platform in developing leaders? In short, how does our society enrich the leadership discovery process? Conclusion Far from agreeing on leadership’s definition, the ten STLHE National Student Fellows seek greater nuance in discussing the term. For some, leadership involves aggression, an energy channeled toward a group’s benefit rather than at a particular individual or collective. In some cases, the 3M students believe leadership may flourish at young ages, based on experiences, reflection and the development of wisdom. Others, however, remain skeptical toward the term. Thus, they focus on the process of leading - where individuals accomplish together what they could never achieve alone. . References Barnett, R. (2000) University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher Education 40: 409-‐422.


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Acknowledgements

We are incredibly grateful to those who made the 3M National Student Fellowship possible and contributed their time and effort. In particular, we extend our sincere thanks to the Coordination Team: Alice Cassidy, Natalie Gerum, Valerie Lopes, Mandy Frake-Mistak, Laura Goldstein, Barbara Kerr, Kari Marken, and Shannon Murray. Special thanks to Natalie and Kari for their expert help and guidance with organizing and developing our concurrent sessions and our conference plenary – you are amazing and we couldn’t have done it without you! We are also grateful to the 2013 team of adjudicators, as well as Arshad Ahmad, Angie Kohen, Sylvia Avery, Muriel McKay, Sean Conley, Elizabeth Wells, and Ron Marken. Special thanks to Greg Snowe and 3M Canada for your generous contributions to the program and everyone at Cape Breton University for their organization and hospitality. We also extend thanks to the CELT organizers and anonymous reviewers, and to those who assisted in the preparation of this manuscript for publication. And finally, to our dedicated friends and family: thank you for being there for us every step of the way – we wouldn’t be us without you. A final thank-you goes to 3M National Student Fellow, Anita Acai, who kindly her impressive “Acknowledgements” section for inclusion in this paper.

Biographies

The 3M National Student Fellowship Award was introduced in 2012 to honour undergraduate students in Canada who have demonstrated qualities of outstanding leadership and who embrace a vision where the quality of their educational experience can be enhanced in academia and beyond. Read the full bios of the second cohort at http://www.stlhe.ca/awards/3m-national-student-fellowships/2013-2/2013-recipients/.


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Engaging Undergraduates in Social Science Research: The Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan Project1

Loleen Berdahl, The University of Saskatchewan Abstract Although student involvement in research and inquiry can advance undergraduate learning, there are limited opportunities for undergraduate students to be directly involved in social science research. Social science faculty members typically work outside of laboratory settings, with the limited research assistance work being completed by graduate students. The challenge, therefore, is to find ways to involve undergraduate social science students in research projects that relate to their field of study and that allow them to develop career-relevant skills. The Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project presents a unique model for undergraduate student involvement in social science research. The project involved over 30 faculty members from across the University of Saskatchewan’s Division of Social Sciences and over 40 undergraduate students. Students were directly involved in data collection, data analysis, report writing and media communications. Through their involvement, students developed and applied research, inquiry and communications skills. Drawing on academic literature regarding undergraduate involvement in research, this paper will present an overview of the Taking the Pulse project, and reflect on the lessons of the project.

1 This work was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Public Outreach grant. I would like to thank Sara Waldbillig for her excellent research assistance.


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Introduction Research universities enjoy numerous opportunities for advancing student involvement in research and inquiry due to their “requisite research environment, including extensive libraries, well-equipped laboratories, sophisticated computer capabilities, and, often, university presses” (Boyer Commission, 1998: 2). The presence of research-active faculty, a research culture, and the necessary research infrastructure might be expected to create an environment in which students, including undergraduate students, are involved in ongoing research and inquiry initiatives.2 Such involvement may take many forms, such as “research-based activity within the curriculum as well as opportunities for students to conduct research alongside academics in special programs (sometimes called vacation scholarship programs, or research internships) designed to give undergraduates real research experiences for a specified period of time” (Brew and Jewell 2012: 47).

Many research universities are increasing their focus on inquiry-based learning (Katkin 2003). Classroom learning experiences, such as the completion of research projects as part of course credit, have the advantage of incorporating large numbers of students. Such experiences are highly valuable, yet at the same time “academic developers need to work within institutions to develop strategies that embrace the notion that the undergraduate learning environment extends beyond the classroom” (Turner et al. 2008: 208). Such strategies may include “providing research opportunities for students over the summer months, whether in the lab, library, or field, or providing research internships with community groups, government, or industry” (Turner et al. 2008: 209). Further, the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University argued that student exposure to interdisciplinary research and the use of different research technologies is important (Boyer Commission 1998, 23, 26). How does engagement in research outside the classroom benefit undergraduate students? One study found that students engaged in such activities reported improved confidence in being able to conduct research and to “think and work like a scientist”; improved ability to apply knowledge, link theory to practice, and use critical thinking skills; and skill advancement across a number of areas, including communication (Seymour et al. 2004). Another study confirmed that students advanced their knowledge, skills, and confidence (Gunn et al. 2008). Yet while student involvement in research and inquiry beyond the classroom presents numerous benefits for undergraduate students, research universities face a number of challenges in making these opportunities available to large numbers of students. Research opportunities are often limited to “higher levels and elite students” (Brew and Jewell, 2012: 55), and research involvement becomes a “reward for hard work” (Brew, 2010: 142). The result is that relatively few undergraduate students are involved in research activities outside the classroom, and these students are often only the strongest students (Katkin, 2003: 26). Participation rates are particularly low for the social sciences and humanities (Katkin, 2003: 26). Limiting factors include the lack of laboratory-based research in these disciplines and limited research funds to pay students for their activities.

2 Academic literature distinguishes between research (activities to generate new knowledge) and inquiry (engagement in research processes that does not generate new knowledge) (Brew and Jewell 2012).


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In 2012, the University of Saskatchewan’s Division of Social Sciences conducted a unique project, Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan, that engaged over 40 undergraduate social science students in interdisciplinary research. Student involvement ranged from data collection to data analysis, report co-authorship and media engagement. Further, student engagement was not limited to particular social science disciplines nor was it limited to only the top academic students. This project, I suggest, may present lessons for other institutions seeking ideas to create projects that engage undergraduate students in research and inquiry outside of the classroom. Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan Project In 2011, the University of Saskatchewan opened the Survey and Group Analysis Laboratory (SGAL), a key research laboratory within the university’s Social Science Research Laboratories (SSRL). Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, with matching grants from the Government of Saskatchewan and the University of Saskatchewan, the SGAL is a survey and focus group research laboratory. Among its data collection capacities are 20 networked computer stations for telephone survey research using computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) software. The SGAL is available to researchers for academic research purposes and is managed by a professional lab manager. In addition to fostering research intensiveness at the University of Saskatchewan, the SGAL was designed to allow for student research engagement and training. While funding guidelines stipulate that the lab must be used for research and not teaching purposes, the SGAL plays a critical role in undergraduate research involvement at the University of Saskatchewan. The Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project was the second telephone survey conducted in the SGAL. Inspired by a 2001 research partnership between the University of Saskatchewan and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project was an innovative partnership between the University of Saskatchewan, PostMedia (publisher of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the Regina LeaderPost), and CBC Saskatchewan. Over 30 faculty members across the Division of Social Sciences designed a survey questionnaire covering a range of topics of interest to the province, including crime and public safety, the economy, natural resource development, Aboriginal issues, immigration and diversity, moral issues, and health, wellbeing and families. Employing student interviewers (discussed below), the SGAL administered the survey in March 2012, resulting in 1,750 completed interviews. The media partners devoted considerable resources to disseminating the survey results; indeed, there were approximately 50 news stories resulting from the partnership.

Students played a critical role in the Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project. Over 40 undergraduate students were involved in the data collection. Hired to work as telephone interviewers, these students received training in survey interviewing techniques and were paid salaries according to preset university rates of pay. Beyond the benefits of salary and work experience, the student interviewers gained direct research knowledge and improved their interpersonal and professional skills. (Many of these students, it should be noted, returned to work on future survey projects at the SGAL, and thus the Taking the Pulse experience resulted in longer-term research and employment opportunities.) The student employment costs were paid by the Division of Social Sciences, which identified Taking the Pulse as a strategic investment in research collaboration, experiential learning and community outreach.

Student involvement continued after data collection was completed. In summer 2012, two graduate students were hired as research assistants to assist with the production of policy briefs


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(short, accessible documents summarizing the main survey findings). The graduate students worked directly with three undergraduate students who were enrolled in a student internship classes offered by the Departments of Sociology and Political Studies; these courses were adapted to meet the needs of the specific project and had an academic supervisor. All three of the interns had worked as Taking the Pulse interviewers and were enthusiastic about being trained in data analysis. Working with the academic researchers, the graduate research assistants and the undergraduate interns complied contextual information, conducted data analyses, created data presentations, and wrote summary reports. The students were all listed as coauthors on the policy briefs; indeed, due to the students’ contributions, the researchers requested that the students be listed as first authors on the policy briefs. (The policy briefs are available at http://ssrl.usask.ca/takingthepulse). All five of the students stated that the experience of working on the policy briefs was invaluable to their education.

The Taking the Pulse project results were publicly released in October 2012 and we continued to involve students through the project dissemination. The media partners each profiled the student involvement in the project; for example, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix ran an article about the student interviewers, while CBC Saskatchewan featured one of the graduate research assistants on its live radio morning show. The partners hosted a public forum at the University of Saskatchewan to discuss the findings and roughly one-third of the audience comprised undergraduate and graduate students (many of whom had been uninvolved with the project) who were interested in discussing the survey findings.

Finally, the Taking the Pulse survey data have been used by students in their own research projects. The survey dataset is available for analysis through an online “data cube”, and the dataset has been used in classroom teaching at the University of Saskatchewan. Lessons and Reflections While the presence of the Social Sciences Research Laboratories provided the University of Saskatchewan with a unique opportunity to create this undergraduate research experience, I believe that there are broader lessons from the Taking the Pulse project.

• Importance of Institutional Leadership. The Taking the Pulse project was the direct result of the Division of Social Sciences deliberately seeking to engage scholars and students in an interdisciplinary research project. While this project happened to center on a telephone survey, it is easy to imagine other research options. The Division-level support was necessary not only to provide the funding for the student interviewers, but also to facilitate the engagement of scholars, establish and manage the media partnership, and coordinate communications. The priority that researchers placed on student engagement was evident throughout the project, and was clearly demonstrated by the researchers’ desire to allow students to use the project as a co-authorship opportunity.

• Value of Providing a Range of Undergraduate Research Opportunities. The project engaged students at varying levels; while most students worked as student interviewers, a small number were able to extend their engagement into data analysis, co-authorship of reports, and even media engagement. At the same time, as the project developed we recognized that not all opportunities for student involvement were realized. In particular, the project did not involve students in the survey design or in the ethics approval process. Doing so would have provided students with unique understandings of research decisions and tradeoffs, and of the centrality of research ethics to research design.


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• Challenges of Funding Undergraduate Student Research Experiences. As noted earlier, the Division provided funding for the student interviewers. Further, the graduate research assistant salaries were funded through a SSHRC Public Outreach grant. The challenge, of course, is that such approaches are not always feasible nor sustainable. At the same time, the project suggested new opportunities for affordable undergraduate student research; specifically, the success of the internship course led the Division to create a new, permanent Social Science internship course. Students enroll in the course, paying regular tuition, and work a specified number of hours on a research project under direct supervision while fulfilling additional academic requirements. This internship model could be adapted to other institutional contexts.

• Student Appreciation of Undergraduate Research Opportunities. The reaction of the students to their involvement in the Taking the Pulse project was more positive than we anticipated. Indeed, we were very pleased that many of the students voiced satisfaction with the learning opportunities afforded by the experience; clearly, for many, the experience went beyond simply a pay cheque and an employment line on their resumes. A Political Studies student stated, “It gives me a sense of purpose. … It’s a fantastic opportunity, completely different from the classroom.” As a Regional and Urban Planning student explained, “There’s a lot of collaboration and community involvement that happens in urban planning and obviously people skills are incredibly important. What better way to get people skills than to talk to people?” And in the words of a Psychology student, “I think it was really great to apply what I have been learning in the classroom in an educational way and an applicable way. It’s a lot different to learn about research methods in the class and to actually apply them, to call people on the phone and to analyze the data. I think it was a really great experience.” The positive feedback from students, while anecdotal, suggests that students do value efforts to engage them in ongoing faculty research projects.

Given the benefits of undergraduate involvement in research and inquiry, many institutions are exploring opportunities to create projects and initiatives to expand student research engagement. While social science research may require creativity to identify and establish such projects, the Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project demonstrates that such efforts can be both successful and beneficial. Author’s Biography Dr. Loleen Berdahl is an Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, the Project Leader for the Survey and Group Analysis Laboratory (SGAL), and was the Principal Investigator of the Taking the Pulse of Saskatchewan project.


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References Boyer Commission. 1998. “Reinventing undergraduate education: A blueprint

for America¹s research universities.” Stony Brook, NY. Retrieved May 2013 from http://www.niu.edu/engagedlearning/research/pdfs/Boyer_Report.pdf

Brew, A. 2010. “Imperatives and challenges in integrating teaching and

research.” Higher Education Research and Development. 29 (2), 139-150.

Brew A. & Jewell, E. 2012.”Enhancing quality learning through experiences of research-based learning: Implications for academic development.” International Journal for Academic Development, 17 (1), 47-58.

Gunn, Vicky, Steve Draper and Mel McKendrick. 2008. “Research-Teaching Linkages:

enhancing graduate attributes, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences”. The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

Katkin, W. 2003. “The Boyer Commission report and its impact on undergraduate research.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 93, 19-38.

Seymour, Elaine, Anne-Barrie Hunter, Sandra L. Laursen, Tracee Deantoni. 2004. “Establishing

the Benefits of Research Experiences for Undergraduates in the Sciences: First Findings from a Three-Year Study.” Wiley InterScience, 493-534.

Turner, N., Wuetherick, B., & Healey, M. 2008. “International

perspectives on student awareness, experiences and perceptions of research.” International Journal for Academic Development, 13(3), 199-211.


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Motivations for Going to University: A Qualitative Study and Class Project

Heather Schmidt, Nicole Carocci, Chris Gardner, Alicia Serroul, & Megan Topalovic, Cape Breton University Abstract We explored student motivations for attending university, including how motivations may change over the course of one’s postsecondary career, by conducting semi-structured interviews with 8 upper-year undergraduates. Participants were also asked to reflect back on their own experiences and provide advice for new university students. We conducted a grounded theory analysis to identify common themes running across the 8 interviews. What emerged was a pattern of transition from a predominance of external/extrinsic motivators at the beginning of one’s university career, into increasingly internal/intrinsic motivators as students discovered their passions and interests. Two unexpected external/extrinsic themes to emerge included: ‘unhelpful high-school guidance-counselling’ and ‘motivation to disprove people who underestimate you’. The strongest internal/intrinsic motivation was ‘desire to help others’. Students can apply these findings to their own lives and as well, universities can gain a better understanding of the supports that are needed to retain students through to graduation. We designed this interview study as a term-project for a third-year psychology course called ‘Qualitative Methods in Psychology’. Rather than only learning about qualitative research, collaborating on this study allowed the 4 student-researchers to gain proficiency and experience with all phases of a qualitative study: from initial design and ethics approval, through to analysis and a poster presented at the 2013 STLHE conference. Afterward, one student-researcher stated that it was “fun and exciting to feel more like a colleague [of the professor], rather than just a student” while another said it was “different than other kinds of courses offered [and] felt fresh.” I (the professor Heather Schmidt) hoped that this sparked a sustained interest in learning about the world for the students, in addition to an appreciation for sound qualitative research practices.

Our goal was to acquire an in-depth understanding of undergraduate students’ motivations for attending university, including how these motivations may change over the course of earning one’s degree. The students decided to explore this particular topic because they were interested in reflecting back on their own experiences as undergraduates and were excited by the prospect of hearing what their peers had to say about the same topic. What would they have in common? In what ways might their experiences differ?

Our literature review suggested that encouragement to attend university from both one’s family and one’s high-school is a very important initial motivator (Woosley & Shepler, 2011). As is exposure to role-models who have earned university degrees and who can impart ‘university-related knowledge’ to ease the student into the post-secondary experience (York-Anderson & Bowman, 1991). These also impact subsequent success as a student. However, this inherently gives so-called ‘traditional students’ (i.e., those from a higher socioeconomic class, who enter university full-time immediately after high-school, often with scholarships) a distinct advantage over ‘non-traditional students’ (i.e., those from lower socioeconomic classes, who are often the first in their family to attend university, are employed while attending classes, pay full-


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fees, and may be older) (Munro, 2011). Non-traditional students receive significantly less exposure to role models and less encouragement from their family, from high school teachers/counsellors, and in the form of scholarships to pursue post-secondary education (Saenz & Barrera, 2007). In spite of this, non-traditional students are attending university in increasing numbers (Munroe, 2011). Universities need to adapt by better understanding how to support non-traditional students. Without supports in place to ease the initial adjustment period in the first few years, non-traditional students are less likely to continue through to graduation (Woosley & Shelper, 2011).

Saenz and Barrera (2007) also found that tuition costs are more salient for non-traditional students, because they are less likely to receive scholarships and more likely working full- or part-time while attending classes to pay for their education. They are also more likely to be conscious of the fact that a university degree increases earning potential. Sometimes called the “consumer view of education”, this nurtures extrinsic motivation (i.e., pursuit of an activity to gain an external reward or to avoid undesirable consequences) (Monroe, 2011). This may be problematic because Pan and Gauvain (2012) have found that university students with stronger intrinsic motivation (i.e., pursuit of an activity as an end in itself because it is rewarding and enjoyable) have more positive outcomes in their learning, lower stress levels, and a more positive adjustment to university. An extrinsic consumer-view of education can further disadvantage non-traditional students and decrease their chances of success at university. Methods Participants Using a combination of convenience sampling and purposive sampling, we recruited 8 participants from the student population at Cape Breton University; all were in their third year of study or higher. Because this was the student-researchers’ first experience with qualitative research, they began by interviewing each other. Although the students selected the remaining 4 participants from among their acquaintances, we ensured that characteristics of both traditional and non-traditional students were represented. We discovered it was difficult to find students who fit cleanly into the categories of either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ students, however, 4/8 reported being employed while attending classes, 3/8 were the first-generation in their family to attend university, and 3/8 reported their parents’ socioeconomic status as being ‘low’ or ‘medium-low’. The majority of participants, however, were in their early twenties (7/8), carrying student loans/debt (7/8), psychology majors (6/8), women (6/8), and from the local area (5/8). Interestingly, 5/8 also reported having changed their major at least once. Procedure After demographics questions, the core interview questions included: (a) “Please tell me about your original motivations for going to university,” (b) “In what ways have your motivations changed or evolved since then?” and (c) “Looking back on your own experiences, what advice would you give to other students?” By asking them to share advice for other students, we created an opportunity for them to serve as role models and to feel empowered about helping others. One week prior to each interview, the participants were provided with a copy of the interview questions, giving them (a) an opportunity to reflect on the questions and (b) enough information to make an informed decision about whether they wished to participate. The student-researchers digitally recorded, and transcribed each interview. Then, working together in class, we


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collaboratively analyzed the data using grounded theory to pull out reoccurring themes and patterns. Results

Figure 1 Visual overview of themes

Figure 1 depicts the themes that emerged from the transcripts. Two themes stayed consistent across the students’ university career: (a) an extrinsic desire to eventually achieve self-determination and financial security for one’s (future) family (voiced by 7/8 participants), and (b) the ongoing challenge of finding enough money to pay for one’s education, which was mentioned by all 8 participants. As one individual explained, no matter how much you work, “it’s never enough”. To make all of the effort and hard work worthwhile, however, they stated that it eventually became necessary to find internal/intrinsic motivation, in addition to this original desire “for going to university […] to direct myself towards a job that would be able to support me in the long run.”

Looking back, 7/8 participants stated that their original decision to pursue post-secondary education had been heavily influenced by other people, which could take the form of expectations and/or pressure from family and peers, on one hand, to encouragement from role models and the presence of “one person to believe in you” on the other, particularly if a student was among the first in their family to attend university.


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Initially it was pressure that I felt to go to school. Because I have doctors [and] lawyers in my family, so I think it was intended that this [is] the path I was going to follow. I felt I’m letting people down if I’m only doing an arts [degree] or something simple. My aunt and uncle: […] both know what it takes to be in university: the struggle, the stress, the papers, the tests. Just to have them in my corner to understand what I’m going through, it really helps. A lot of my family has gone to university. So I guess in a way, it was who I knew that was kind of pushing me. Like these are the people who succeeded in my life and I want to succeed like they did.

Receiving scholarships was another factor that initially motivated 6/8 students to enter university. An unexpected finding was that 7/8 participants shared negative experiences of high-school guidance-counselling, in which they reported being discouraged from “setting their sights too high”. Instead of exploring or challenging themselves, students were advised to pursue less ambitious options:

They basically decided that my math marks were never good through high school. And they decided that I should just take an arts program, and I should never look at any of the sciences. They were trying to push me towards trades. But all my other marks were 90’s. […] They really were a deterrent for me for going to university, not a motivation.

I think that’s why I switched my degree 3 times! Seriously, [high school] guidance was brutal. It was bad. […] I had no direction.

Interestingly, a few students reported transforming this negative experience into an incentive to go to university because they wanted to prove their guidance-counsellor wrong! Others spoke about the importance of ‘one person who believes in you’ to counteract bad advice from high-school counsellors:

She opened my eyes to other fields than policing. You can be a conservation officer, or fisheries. Or if you’re interested in legal studies, you can be a lawyer. To me, that was like, you’re the chair of [the] department looking at my marks, all 50’s and 60’s, and she’s telling me I can do all these things if I really wanted to. She really opened up my eyes.

Others also spoke about being motivated by a desire to disprove peers who underestimated them during high school: A varsity-athlete talked about her motivation to go to university in order to disprove the “dumb jock” stereotype that her peers had labeled her with, while another wanted to disprove a stereotype in her home-community that “people from my family [don’t] go to school; I wanted to prove that my family was a good family.” All of these themes represent external/extrinsic motivations to pursue post-secondary, and students reported them as dominating within the first year or two of their university experience. Gradually, however, they experienced a shift toward internal/intrinsic motivations:

I went from my friends wanting me to go, and my family, and pressures of coming out of high school, to me wanting this for myself. Now it’s like, trying to figure out my job, my career, what I want to do now.


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At some point you have to stop thinking about what people expect you to do, and start doing what you think is going to make you happy in the long run.

Most often, participants discovered that their true passion in life involved helping other people and making a positive difference in the world. For 4/8 participants, they reported that this inspiration had come from past experiences in which someone had helped them. It inspired them to find a career in which they could do the same for others.

I want to be that adult that kids look up to and say: “that’s who I want to be like”. I knew I had issues so I was like ‘psychology, okay, I’ll get into that for self-help purposes.’ From there it was ‘hey, I can see why this is so helpful and that’s really what I want to do’. If I can help even one person, then I think that will be viewed as a success for me. There’s just something about helping somebody else. Internally I feel so much better and not just I feel better for myself but I feel better that I’ve actually done something to make the community or the world a better place.

Conclusion We found that collaborating on this study was an effective way for the students to learn qualitative research skills. As a one-semester term-project, however, significant time-limitations were imposed. As a result, our sample best represents the perspectives of students who are: psychology majors, women, in their early twenties, and locals (rather than students who moved away from home for university). This leaves several other perspectives under-represented. When this course is taught again, we hope that the next class will want to explore the perspectives that were underrepresented in our study. We also discovered that it may not be authentic to compare ‘traditional’ versus ‘non-traditional’ students because many students meet criteria from both categories. Our findings also suggest that improved academic-counselling is needed that will encourage new students to explore widely and challenge themselves in their first few years of university to discover their intrinsic interests. References Munro, L. (2011). “Go boldly, dream large!”: The challenges confronting non-traditional

students at university. Australian Journal of Education, 55(2), 115-131.

Pan, Y., & Gauvain, M. (2012). The continuity of college students and its predictors: A three year longitudinal study. Learning and Individual Differences, 22(1), 92-99.

Saenz, V. & Barrera, D. (2007). What we can learn from UCLA's "First in My Family" data? Retention in Higher Education, 21(9), 1-3.


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Woosley, S. A., & Shepler, D. K. (2011). Understanding the early integration experiences of first-generation college students. College Student Journal, 45(4), 700-714.

York-Anderson, D. C., & Bowman, S. L. (1991). Assessing the college knowledge of first-generation and second-generation college students. Journal of College Student Development, 32, 116-122.


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Inquiry Guided Learning Projects for the Development of Critical Thinking in the College Classroom:

A pilot study Danielle C. Bentley, University of Toronto, APLUS Institute of Dental Hygiene Abstract This paper describes the inaugural success of implementing Inquiry Guided Learning Projects within a college-level human anatomy and physiology course. In this context, scientific inquiry was used as a means of developing skills required for critical thinking among students. The projects were loosely designed using the Information Search Process (Kuhlthau, 1991) as a framework with emphasis placed on three of the six stages: question selection, scientific research, and presentation of results. The projects were quantitatively assessed using self-reported confidence ratings using a 10-point Likert scale. The projects were also qualitatively assessed using student feedback focusing on student suggestions for project improvement. Moving forward, the Inquiry Guided Learning Projects will be integrated as a formal course component, with the next stage of implementation to include a thorough assessment of student learning outcomes. Introduction The ability to independently analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information, otherwise called critical thinking, is viewed as an essential component of college training (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1990, 1993, 2010). Despite the importance of critical thinking, all too often in post-secondary science courses curricula are designed so that established scientific facts/understandings are merely presented to students. The promotion of this surface level learning can be intensified by the increased reliance on poorly designed multiple choice tests which can promote rote memorization among students (Stanger-Hall, 2012). In these content-heavy course environments students may develop passive learning strategies where they rely on the course instructor to ‘give them’ knowledge in a unidirectional conversation-style dialogue. In order to evade this passive reliance on unidirectional learning, students at APLUS Institute of Dental Hygiene participate in novel and innovative educational strategies within their biomedical science courses, such as Movement Guided Learning (Bentley, 2013). Most recently, Inquiry Guided Learning Projects (IGLPs) were introduced to both first and second term students as an inaugural pilot study. This pilot study had two research goals. The primary research goal was to evaluate improvement in students’ self-perceived abilities to complete tasks pertaining to critical thinking. The secondary research goal was to determine project components that could be adjusted to more effectively meet the needs of students. Inquiry Guided Learning Project Design and Implementation


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Active learning strategies, specifically the strategy of scientific inquiry, have been shown to produce superior learning outcomes in various postsecondary science education environments (Baum, 2013; Luckie et al., 2012; Prince & Felder, 2007). Building from this previous post-secondary success, Inquiry Guided Learning Projects (IGLPs) were used as a strategy to develop skills pertaining to critical thinking. As such, the IGLPs were designed with the intent of loosely guiding students through the six stages of the Information Search Process: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation (Kuhlthau, 1991). Three of the six stages (selection, formulation, and presentation) are imperative directly to the process of guided inquiry as it pertains to the IGLPs. Throughout the project these stages were referred to as Research Question Selection, Research Answer Formulation, and Research Answer Presentation accordingly. The IGLPs were introduced to students on the first day of the course semester. At this point, students were randomly divided into small groups of 3-4 and instructed to brainstorm a research question that they would be genuinely interested in developing an answer to. The only limitations to their group questions were that the question topic had to come from the overarching theme of ‘science’, and that the question had to be specific enough that a single answer could be realistically formed. Some examples of student questions include: How do bees navigate our world? Why is the centre of the earth so hot? Does the use of colour affect our ability to memorize? How is the influenza vaccine made each year?

Throughout the semester student groups participated in three pre-scheduled check-ins with the course instructor. At each of the check-ins students were required to have completed previously communicated expectations. The purpose of outlined expectations was two-fold: to ensure project progress was occurring throughout the semester, and to provide guidance so students were moving through the stages of the Information Search Process as anticipated. Table 1 below outlines the check-in expectations.

Table 1 Description of inquiry project check-ins Time Point Group Expectations Check-In One

¼ through the semester

- Research question chosen based on initial assessment of current literature

- Project tasks divided among group members Check-In Two

½ through the semester

- Completed thorough research of scientific literature - Formulated a research answer - Provided evidence of ‘misdirected’ research paths and necessary

research adjustments that were utilized Check-In Three

¾ through the semester

- Literature citation completed - Creative and engaging strategies have been considered for final

verbal presentation To conclude the semester, each group prepared a 10 minute in-class oral presentation. Final project marks were determined using a combination of evaluations. In descending order of grade weight these evaluations included instructor assigned marks based on both individual performance and overall group performance during final presentation, student self-assigned marks based on their completion of project tasks throughout the semester, and peer-assigned marks based on their completion of project tasks throughout the semester.


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Formal research assessment of the IGLPs occurred in two ways. Quantitatively, students’ self-reported their perceived ability to perform the aforementioned tasks of Research Question Selection, Research Answer Formulation, and Research Answer Presentation at two time points; at the beginning of the semester (pre-IGLP) and at the end the semester (post-IGLP). To complete this self-assessment a 10-point Likert scale was used with 10-(the strongest) through to 1-(the weakest). Pre-IGLP to post-IGLP were compared using a paired Student’s t-test with statistical significance set at p = 0.05. All statistics are presented as mean ± standard deviation. Qualitatively, students provided anonymous open-ended feedback in regards to the project structure, the allocation of group members, time commitment, question generation, self-evaluation of student learning, and progression of skill development. With this being the inaugural pilot implementation, the information collected from student feedback was imperative to the refinement of the project.

Results of Inaugural IGLP Implementation A total of 29 first (n=11) and second term (n=18) students were divided into 9 small groups. Each group successfully completed the IGLP by providing a scientifically justified answer to a self-generated research question. Overall, students’ performances throughout the IGLPs were extremely high resulting in a class average of 82.3 ± 4.8%. Following the completion of the IGLP students indicated they were more confident in their ability to Select a Research Question (6.9±1.9 to 8.5±1.3, t(28)=-6.35 p< 0.01), they were more confident in their ability to Formulate an Answer to a Research Question (6.0±1.8 to 8.1±1.3, t(28)=-6.76, p< 0.05), and they were more confident in their ability to Present the Answer to a Research Question (6.2±1.9 to 8.0±1.6, t(28)=-6.20, p< 0.01).

Students enjoyed the Inquiry Guided Learning Projects (7.9±2.3) while at the same time finding the project to be academically challenging (7.8±1.8). Despite indicating the academic challenge of the project, 100% of students recommended that the IGLP be continued at APLUS Institute.

Qualitative feedback revealed that students would prefer more rigorous direction from the course instructor. For many of them this was the first time they had to find and read peer-reviewed journal articles in order to extract important information. Students indicated that more detailed information would be useful on the topics of; how to find journal articles, how to read them, how to understand what the statistics meant, how to correctly cite journal articles, and how to synthesize information into one summarized answer. Moving Forward With the success of the pilot implementation of the Inquiry Guided Learning Projects at APLUS Institute, the decision has been made to formally incorporate this teaching and learning strategy in the Gross Anatomy and General Physiology first semester course. As part of this full incorporation a thorough research assessment of academic effectiveness and student enjoyment will occur, approved by the University of Toronto Research ethics board and led by the course instructor. This thorough assessment is currently underway.

Changes that have been made to the IGLP are based on both the quantitative results of students’ own abilities and the qualitative feedback provided by students. One of the more impactful changes is the addition of four Information Sessions that will be scattered throughout the semester. The information sessions have been designed to provide condensed information on topics pertaining to: Question Selection and Group Communication Strategies, How to Perform


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an Academic Article Search, APA Referencing, and Verbal Presentation Skills. It is anticipated that these Information Sessions will be most useful for students new to the process of critical thinking and scientific research. Assessment of the new IGLP structure will again occur using student self-perceived ranking of research confidence and research ability. In addition, student learning preferences (as defined by Fleming’s VARK Questionnaire (Fleming & Mills, 1992)) and learning styles (as defined by Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory (Kolb, 1984)) will be considered as covariates in overall performance to determine if a project of this nature is more likely to be successful for certain student learners.It is predicted that the IGLP will be positively received among students, yet will challenge them through the process of determining a research direction, scouring current academic literature to synthesize an answer, and presenting the answer to their research question in an engaging and stimulating manner. Conclusion The full preparation of future health care professionals involves more than just the dissemination of rote facts or the mastery of health care techniques. It is imperative that we also equip these future professionals with the skills required to properly critique information in the scientific community around them. The ability to independently analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information will lead to future success in health care. As a means of developing critical thinkers, learning strategies based on inquiry, such as the IGLPs, can prepare students to be active and engaged professionals possessing the skills for academic discovery following formal education. Author’s Biography Danielle Bentley is currently a doctoral student at the University of Toronto studying cardiovascular physiology. Since January of 2011 she has been an instructor for numerous courses in the field of human anatomy and pathophysiology at APLUS Institute of Dental Hygiene. As an educator, Danielle is interested in the development and analysis of both experiential and interactive learning strategies.


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References (AAAS), A. A. f. t. A. o. S. (1990). Science for All Americans. New York: Oxford University

Press. AAAS. (1993). Benchmarks for Science Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press. AAAS. (2010). Vision and Change: A Call to Action. Washington, DC: AAAS. Baum, E. J. (2013). Augmenting Guided-Learning With a Blended Classroom Approach.

Journal of College Science Teaching, 42(6), 27-33. Bentley, D. (2013). Movement Guided Learning© as a Means of Musculoskeletal Anatomy

Instruction. Journal of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, 27, 960.965.

Fleming, N., & Mills, C. (1992). Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for Reflection. To

Improve the Academy, 11, 137-155. Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development.

Anglewood Cliffs: NJ: Prentice Hall. Kuhlthau, C. (1991). Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user's perspective.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361-371. Luckie, D. B., Aubry, J. R., Marengo, B. J., Rivkin, A. M., Foos, L. A., & Maleszewski, J. J.

(2012). Less teaching, more learning: 10-yr study supports increasing student learning through less coverage and more inquiry. Adv Physiol Educ, 36(4), 325-335. doi: 10.1152/advan.00017.2012

Prince, M., & Felder, R. (2007). The Many Faces of Inductive Teaching and Learning. Journal

of College Science Teaching, 36(5), 14-20. Stanger-Hall, K. F. (2012). Multiple-choice exams: an obstacle for higher-level thinking in

introductory science classes. CBE Life Sci Educ, 11(3), 294-306. doi: 10.1187/cbe.11-11-0100


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The Impact of a Required Undergraduate Health and Wellness Course on Students’ Awareness and

Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease Usha Kuruganti, University of New Brunswick Abstract As part of the undergraduate curriculum, the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) requires all students to take an undergraduate course in physical activity, health and wellness in their third year of study. This capstone course allows students to integrate concepts from their program regarding physical activity, fitness, and wellness. While students have anecdotally indicated that this course has improved their knowledge of health and wellness, this data had not been quantitatively assessed previously. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the course on students’ views of the impact of physical activity on disease and overall health and wellness. A survey was administered to the students enrolled in the course at the beginning and again at the end of the semester. The survey requested data in four categories; 1) the demographics of the student, 2) students’ knowledge of health agencies and guidelines, 3) students’ physical activity, health and wellness awareness and 4) students’ self-assessment of their knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease. The data showed that, at the end of the course, students felt that they improved in three areas: 1) their knowledge of health agencies and guidelines, 2) their awareness of physical activity and its impact on health and wellness and 3) their knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease. The results of this work provided information on the impact of a required health and wellness course on students’ knowledge of health and suggested that the material in the course helped their overall understanding of health. Introduction The Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) requires that all students enrolled in the bachelor’s of science degree complete a required course in health and wellness in their third year. The focus of this course is on the impact of physical activity on health and wellness and, in particular, the complications that can arise due to chronic disease. The course is considered a capstone course for the faculty and students are expected to integrate concepts from their undergraduate program and apply their skills in the area of health promotion and disease prevention. In addition, the course attempts to improve the student’s knowledge and awareness of health and wellness issues and the impact of his/her behavior on his/her own health as this can impact one’s long term quality of life and health status. Pearman et al. (1997) reported four major influences on health status: environment, the healthcare system, human biology, and lifestyle. They continued that one aspect of promoting a healthy lifestyle has been the presence of required lifetime health and physical education classes at colleges and universities.

Much research has suggested that adult behaviours are influenced by behaviour in adolescence and young adulthood (Dishman, et al. 2013, Moore et al., 2003, Riddoch et al., 2009, Stevens et al. 2009)). In degree programs that are targeted at health sciences and/or health


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education and promotion, it is important to determine if the knowledge obtained changes or improved the attitudes that students may have regarding health education.

Surprisingly, little research has been conducted on changes in knowledge and attitudes of students who are enrolled in a community health course (Rose and Ayad, 2008). In order to investigate these changes, this study examined the effect of a required health and wellness course on students’ views of the impact of physical activity on disease and their awareness of health and wellness. A survey was administered to a class of students enrolled in KIN 3282, ‘Physical Activity, Health and Wellness’ at the beginning of the course and again at the end of the semester. The survey requested demographic data and responses in three areas of health and wellness. The data obtained was examined for differences pre and post the course. Methods An attitudinal survey (Lewis and Seymour, 1997) was developed to examine students’ perceptions of the course. The survey was designed to examine students’ perceptions of the content of the course, the specific topics covered in the course material, and the various learning components of the course. They were provided with an overview of what the research was about and asked to be as honest as possible. Any concerns students may have had regarding their results were alleviated by having the written survey administered by a teaching assistant not connected with the research along with ensuring the principal investigator (i.e. course instructor) was absent from the classroom. The students were informed that none of the surveys would be examined until after the course instructor entered their grades at the end of the term and therefore their responses could have no impact on their final grade. The university research ethics board approved this research (REB 2013-001).

Students were asked demographic questions (e.g. age, gender, year of university study) and then asked to complete a survey and rate their understanding and knowledge of three key areas: 1) their knowledge of health agencies and guidelines (Table 1), 2) their awareness of physical activity and its impact on health and wellness (Table 2) and 3) their knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease (Table 3). For ‘Knowledge of Health Agencies’ students were required to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to 5 questions regarding their knowledge of national surveys and public health agencies (both Canadian and international). For ‘Physical Activity, Health and Wellness Awareness’ and ‘Self-Assessment of Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease’ students were asked to respond to a series of statements using a 5-point Likert scale (Likert, 1932) rating their responses from ‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘Strongly Agree’. Table 1 Knowledge of Health Agencies and Guidelines Survey Questions Knowledge of Health Agencies and Guidelines Please check the appropriate box for each statement below: YES NO I know about the Canadian Community Health Survey I know about public health agencies (both Canadian and international agencies)

I am familiar with Canada’s Food Guide I am familiar with the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines and the Canadian Sedentary Behaviour Guidelines

I seek out health information in magazines, the paper or on TV


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Table 2 Physical Activity, Health and Wellness Awareness Survey Questions Physical Activity, Health and Wellness Awareness Please agree or disagree with the following (check the appropriate box):

Strongly Agree

Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree

There is a relationship between lifestyle factors and health

Taking part in physical activities can make your health better and get your body in better condition

Exercise provides an important relief from the stress of everyday life

It is important to be required to take a physical activity, health and wellness course in university

It is important for kinesiologists to understand the concepts of public health and health promotion

Studying health is important to me Health information is useful in making better lifestyle choices

I understand how my behaviours affect my health

Table 3 Self-Assessment of Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease Survey Questions Self Assessment of Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease Please assess your knowledge of the following (check the appropriate box):

Very Good

Good Satisfactory Sufficient Deficient

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with disease mortality

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with coronary heart disease

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with cerebrovascular disease and stroke

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with hypertension

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity


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with dyslipidemia Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with obesity

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with diabetes

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with osteoporosis

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with cancer

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with mental health

Knowledge of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF)

Understanding of physical activity barriers

Of the sixty-two students enrolled in the course, thirty-five completed the surveys (both pre and post course), 16 males, 19 females, mean age = 21.3 years. A repeated measures Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) test was run with the alpha level set to 0.05. The MANOVA allowed for comparisons between subjects and within subjects as well as any interactions. The independent variables were time of test (pre/post) and gender and the dependent variables were the responses to each survey question. Results There were no significant differences detected in any of the results due to gender. Knowledge of Health Agencies Prior to the course, 69% of students surveyed indicated that they did not know about the Canadian Community Health Survey and 46% did not know about public health agencies. After the course there was a significant improvement in both of these areas. It was found that 86% of students knew about the survey (p < 0.001) and an overwhelming 97% were familiar with public health agencies (p < 0.001). No significant changes were noted for the remaining three questions. All students were aware of Canada’s Food Guide. Prior to the course 25 (of 35) students indicated that they were familiar with the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines and the Canadian Sedentary Guidelines and after the course this increased to 33. Finally, prior to the course 22 students indicated that they actively seek out health information (through television, news media, etc.) and after the course this increased to 26 students. Physical Activity, Health and Wellness Awareness


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After completion of the course, there was a statistically significant improvement in the rating of the following question from ‘neutral’ to ‘strongly agree’ (p=0.001):

Question 4: ‘It is important to be required to take a physical activity, health and wellness course in university’

Prior to the course, eight students noted that they were neutral, 15 students agreed with the questions and 12 students indicated that they strongly agreed. After completion of the course, one noted that they were neutral, nine agreed with the question and 25 indicated that they strongly agreed. No significant changes were detected in the other eight questions. Self-‐Assessment of Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease It was found that students’ responses to all twelve statements improved after the course (p < 0.001). In addition, prior to the course several students responded ‘deficient’ in 10 of the 12 questions, however after completion of the course, no student responded ‘deficient’ to any of the 12 questions. Table 4 shows the full results (pre and post) for each of the 12 questions. Table 4 Self-Assessment of Knowledge of Physical Activity and Chronic Disease Survey Questions. Note that for each question after completion of the course, no student reported ‘Deficient’ in any of the content modules.

Question Response Number of Responses (Total n = 35)

PRE POST

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with disease mortality

Deficient 1 0 Sufficient 3 0 Satisfactory 15 1 Good 13 13 Very Good 3 21

Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with coronary heart disease


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with cerebrovascular disease and stroke


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with hypertension



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Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with dyslipidemia


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with obesity


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with diabetes


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with osteoporosis


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with cancer


Understanding of the current literature linking physical activity with mental health


Knowledge of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF)


Understanding of physical activity barriers



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Discussion The results from this study suggested that the health and wellness course improved students’ knowledge of the Canadian Community Health Survey and public health agencies. Students also indicated that the course was important to their academic program and should be required in the undergraduate program. Interestingly, students showed significant improvement in ratings in their self-assessment of knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease suggesting a positive change in their perceptions and attitudes towards healthy behaviours.

The results found here are similar to other studies of college students. Pearman et al. (1997) used a cross-sectional mail survey and compared alumni from a college that required all students to take a lifetime health and physical education course to alumni from a college that did not require this type of course. They found that the lifetime health and physical education course did have a positive effect on selected health knowledge; attitudes and behaviors compared to those were not exposed. Specifically, they found that those that took the course were more likely to know their blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and recommended dietary intake, than the comparison group. In addition, the course positively influenced students’ attitudes toward exercise, eating and smoking. While their study had a much larger sample size (n= 979 completed surveys) than the research presented here (n= 35), the results showed similar findings. Rose and Ayad (2008) examined the attitudes of chiropractic college students who were enrolled in a community health class to identify factors that may be associated with changes in knowledge and attitudes towards health promotion and public health concepts. They found that a course in community health improved the students’ knowledge and positive attitudes towards health promotion and public health. The surveys administered by Rose and Ayad were similar to those administered in this study, as both investigations examined students’ familiarity the public health system and their knowledge of public health agencies, chronic diseases and the impact of lifestyle factors on health. Similar to our data, there was little difference between genders. One topic that was not included in the present study was the knowledge of epidemiological measures and statistics. Future research should include this information as well as it provides another measure of students’ abilities pre and post the course.

More recently Hastings et al. (2012) examined the impact of a one-week course on global health on the attitude of third –year medical school students. Similar to our study they used a Likert scale to examine the students’ attitudes prior to and after the course. While the time frame was much shorter than the work done here (one week vs. 16 weeks), they found that there was a significant change in attitude and increase in health awareness. In our work, the survey was administered to the class during the first week of classes and administered again during the final week of classes.

One area that was not examined in this work, but that should be considered in the future is the long-term impact of these types of courses on healthy behaviours. Mack and Shaddox (2004) examined the attitudes toward physical activity and exercise of university students enrolled in Personal Wellness classes. Similar to our work, they found that students (n=1625) showed a significant improvement in short-term attitude toward physical activity and exercise following completion of the university-required personal wellness course. A long study, for example surveying students in first year and again in fourth year, may provide better indications of the long term impact of health education.

In this work we focused on the student’s self-assessment of changes in their knowledge and awareness regarding health and wellness. We did not determine if this actually lead to changes in behavior. DeVoe et al., (1998) surveyed 286 college students during the first and last


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week of classes in order to analyze the impact of health, fitness, and physical activity courses on their attitudes and behaviours. They found that a majority of students made a positive change in at least one significantly health-related behavior. This type of investigation would be useful in the future to determine the actual impact the course may have on behavioral change.

Finally, we did not compare grades to survey responses or change in responses to determine any correlations, however these should be examined in the future. This may provide useful information regarding academic achievement and improvement in health knowledge. It could also help to determine the efficacy of the defined course outcomes and help to determine if the objectives of the course are being met. Conclusion This research examined the impact of a required undergraduate course in health and wellness on students’ awareness and knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease. All students were enrolled full-time in an undergraduate bachelor’s of science degree in kinesiology. The results obtained suggested that the course was an important part of the students’ academic program and that by the end of the term, students’ knowledge of health and wellness improved. It was encouraging to also note that students showed significant improvements in their self-assessment of knowledge of physical activity and chronic disease. Two areas for future consideration are 1) the long-term implications of these types of courses and 2) the relationship between academic achievement (grades) and changes in awareness and knowledge. Author’s Biography Usha Kuruganti is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at UNB and Co-Director of the Andrew and Marjorie McCain Human Performance Laboratory within the Richard J. CURRIE Centre at UNB. Her research interests include human movement analysis and human factors engineering. Her scholarly work focuses on teaching methodologies, problem based learning and engineering accreditation. References DeVoe, D, Kennedy, C, Ransdell, L, Pirson, B., DeYoung, W., and Casey, K. (1998). Impact of

health, fitness, and physical activity courses on the attitudes and behaviours of college students. Journal of Gender, Culture and Health, 3(4), 243- 255.

Dishman, R., Health, G. and Lee, I-M. (2013). Physical Activity Epidemiology, 2nd Edition.

Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL. Hastings, A., Pardiñaz-Solis, R., Phillips, M. and Hennessy, M. (2012). Measuring attitude

change in medical students: lessons from a short course on global health. Medical Education Development, 2, 1- 4.

Lewis, E.& Seymour, E. (1997). Attitudinal survey. Retrieved June 1, 2013, from

http://www.flaguide.org/extra/download/cat/attitude/attitude.pdf Likert, Rensis (1932). "A technique for the measurement of attitudes". Archives of Psychology

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Learning Task Inventories (LTIs). Exploration of Optimal Conditions to Help Students Develop, Improve

and Sustain Good Study and Learning Practices Stephen MacNeil, Eileen Wood, Lucia Zivcakova, Robyn Glover & Patrick Smith, Wilfrid Laurier University Abstract To support students in an introductory organic chemistry course, scaffolding in the form of weekly Learning Task Inventories (LTIs) were introduced. LTIs are chapter-by-chapter lists of detailed learning tasks students are expected to master during the course. This paper describes efforts to effectively implement LTIs, the effect of differing implementations of LTIs on students’ final exam grades and students’ reactions to the use of LTIs. Introduction Students’ ability to accurately monitor and assess their learning is associated with academic success (Schraw, 1998; Ku & Ho, 2010). However, many students, even at the university level, lack the metacognitive skills and strategies that would allow them to maximize their learning (Wood, Motz & Willoughby, 1998). In order to facilitate student learning, instructors can augment their instruction by providing both course specific content and instructional supports that scaffold students so that they can acquire the monitoring and assessment skills they need to succeed. These supports are especially important for ‘feared’ courses such as organic chemistry (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997) where student anxiety can further limit students’ use of appropriate learning strategies. To assist students in an introductory organic chemistry course in developing critical monitoring and self-assessment skills, we offered scaffolding support through weekly Learning Task Inventories (LTIs). LTIs are chapter-by-chapter lists of detailed learning tasks that students are expected to master during the course. The implementation of the LTIs to the introductory Organic Chemistry I course at Wilfrid Laurier University has evolved over the past three years and culminated in the full experimental analysis presented in this paper. The nine LTIs for the 12 week course were first developed and used in 2010. Portable document formats (pdf) of the LTIs were released through the course management system at the beginning of each of nine weeks and remained available for students for the remainder of the term. We believed that these LTIs would be an excellent resource for students that could be used as check lists for weekly course review and for preparation for the midterm test and final exam, and we assumed they would be accessed early and often by most students. To our surprise, the LTIs were vastly underutilized. Figure 1 displays the percentage of students who accessed each of the LTIs throughout the term. Given that these percentages represent cumulative end-of-term data, it appears that a majority of students quickly determined that the LTIs were not worth their time. On average across the term, only 40% of students accessed the LTIs and among those who accessed the LTIs, there is no certainty that they utilized them as they were intended.


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Figure 1 Percentage of students accessing LTIs by chapter (fall, 2010)

In an attempt to increase student use of LTIs in 2011, the LTIs were released as surveys through the course management system. For each learning task, students were asked to rate their ability to perform the task on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = cannot do this task; 5 = can do this task very well). The LTIs were made available to students at the end of each of nine weeks, and a selective release feature of the course management system was used to effectively force students to complete each LTI in order to gain access to on-line materials for the following week. In hindsight, this was a bad idea and we have proof! Throughout the term, one of us (SM) scanned LTI results on a regular basis and noticed that, despite significant variations in level of difficulty among learning tasks, there was less and less variation in student responses as the term progressed; by the second half of the term, most learning tasks yielded response distributions that were fairly symmetrical bell curves. To test the suspicion that students were not taking the LTIs seriously, the following “learning tasks” were inserted into one of the LTIs: “state Dr. MacNeil’s middle name and date of birth” and “select 1 if you are reading this”. Shockingly, results for these “learning tasks” mirrored the other legitimate learning tasks, with less than half of the 222 students who completed the LTI selecting 1 in each case! With these results in hand, we came to the realization that a well designed research study was required to investigate optimal conditions for implementation of LTIs. Methods Participants In the fall term of 2012, 293 (or 94% of) students enrolled in Organic Chemistry I at Wilfrid Laurier University were recruited for the LTI research study. Willing participants signed a consent form on the first day of class. Of those participating, 186 females (69%) and 82 males


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(31%) reported their gender; 233 students (86%) reported that they were 2nd year students while 37 students (14%) reported that they were either 3rd or 4th year students; and 240 students (87%) reported that the course was required for their program whereas 37 students (13%) reported that they were taking the course as an elective. Course enrollment by major is displayed in Figure 2. This distribution is typical of recent years.

Figure 2 Organic chemistry I course enrollment by major (fall, 2012)

Materials Students completed an introductory survey, nine weekly LTIs and an end-of-term survey. We used the introductory survey to collect demographic information (student number, age, gender, ethnicity, general chemistry grades and overall GPA, and program of study) and to gauge students’ attitudes toward and expectations for the course. The end-of-term survey was used to assess student reaction to the use of LTIs. The LTIs were developed by the course instructor (SM) and made available to students at the end of each week. For each LTI, learning tasks were presented in groups of 4-6 items and for each group students answered the following questions on a 5-point Likert scale: (1) “For the previous learning tasks, how well do you think you would be able to complete the tasks?” and (2) “How difficult was the content material for these learning tasks?” Students were assigned to one of five instructional conditions (see below) and additional materials were used to supplement the LTIs in these different treatment conditions. For example, in four conditions we introduced nine different metacognitive prompts, one per LTI, to encourage students to break away from the learning tasks and consider what they were doing. In addition, three conditions included post-LTI quizzes, consisting of five multiple choice questions related to the content of the LTI. These were used to provide further support to students and to allow them to compare perceived knowledge, as indicated by responses to the LTI, to actual


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performance. To gauge the effect of feedback, we provided two groups of students with partial or complete feedback on their quiz responses. Partial feedback revealed the correct answer without an explanation whereas complete feedback included the correct answer accompanied by a detailed explanation. All students who received the quiz also completed a post-quiz survey. Procedure On the first day of class, students willing to participate in the study signed a consent form and provided their email address. Students were then emailed a link and instructions for the introductory survey. Email addresses were used to randomly assign participants to one of five experimental conditions (see Table 1). Students in Condition 1 received the basic LTI only; students in Condition 2 received the LTI and the metacognitive prompts; students in Conditions 3-5 received the LTI, metacognitive prompts, the 5-question multiple choice quiz and the post-quiz survey. Students in Condition 3 received no feedback on their quiz responses, students in Condition 4 received partial feedback and students in Condition 5 received complete feedback. For nine consecutive weeks of the course, excepting a break between weeks 3 and 4 for the midterm test, students were emailed a link with instructions for completing each of the nine LTIs. Following the final exam, students were emailed a link with instructions for completing the end-of-term survey. Table 1 Variations in LTI Treatment Conditions

Condition 1 2 3 4 5 LTI √ √ √ √ √ Prompt X √ √ √ √ Quiz X X √ √ √ Quiz Feedback n/a n/a none partial full Survey n/a n/a √ √ √

Results and Discussion Effect of condition For the current study, we did not measure metacognitive skills directly. Instead, final exam grades were used as the dependent variable to test the effect of varying LTI conditions. Figure 3 depicts average final exam grades for students in each of the conditions. At first glance, it appears that students in Condition 1, those receiving the least amount of support through weekly LTIs, achieved the highest grades on the final exam. However, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) test revealed that the differences in final exam grades among treatment conditions were not statistically significant [F(4, 281) = 1.35, p = n.s.]. This was a surprise as we had assumed greater support through quizzes and feedback would improve learning gains and translate to higher final exam grades.


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Figure 3 Final exam grades vs LTI treatment condition Effect of number of LTIs completed It is well known that distributed practice, the technique of dividing study efforts into frequent, relatively short study sessions, is more beneficial to student learning than is massed practice, i.e., “cramming” (Benjamin & Tullis, 2010). A linear regression revealed that the number of LTIs completed was a significant predictor of final exam grades [F(1, 284) = 33.57, p < 0.001], with students completing more LTIs achieving higher grades. An easy criticism of this result is that better students, who would have achieved higher exam grades anyway, simply completed more LTIs. To avoid this criticism, we ran step-wise regressions to understand the relative contribution of prior learning, as indicated by self-reported general chemistry grades (CH110 and CH111) and overall GPAs prior to the course, and the number of LTIs completed to final exam grades. Results of the step-wise regressions are summarized in Table 2. The beta weights provide a summary of the relative contributions of each of the components in the equation. By studying Table 2 it is clear that GPA and prior performance in CH110 and CH111 each predict final exam performance. However, of interest, the number of LTIs completed also predicts final exam performance and accounts for variance above and beyond that accounted for by previous GPA and chemistry course performance.


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Table 2 Step-wise regression results for prior learning vs. number of LTIs completed

Variable B T R R2 ΔR2 Step 1 o/a GPA Step 2 o/a GPA #LTIs completed

4.04 3.68 2.03

10.68*** 9.63*** 3.69***

0.55 0.58

0.30 0.34

0.30 0.03

Step 1 CH110 grade Step 2 CH110 grade #LTIs completed

0.89 0.84 1.54

10.28*** 9.59*** 2.77**

0.57 0.59

0.32 0.34

0.32 0.02

Step 1 CH111 grade Step 2 CH111 grade #LTIs completed

0.60 0.54 1.62

8.47*** 7.42*** 2.68***

0.49 0.51

0.24 0.26

0.24 0.02

**p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001 Closer inspection of Table 2 reveals another salient point. The beta weights in Table 2 reveal that overall GPA is a better predictor of final exam grades in Organic Chemistry I than is the number of LTIs completed but that number of LTIs completed predicts final exam grades better than CH110 and CH111 grades do. One interpretation of this is that overall GPA reflects a student’s general study skills (e.g., problem solving, time management, note taking and metacognitive skills) whereas CH110 and CH111 grades reflect a student’s chemistry content knowledge, and that a student’s general study skills, or “process”, is more important in achieving higher grades than their content knowledge from previous relevant courses. Thus, completing more LTIs may provide a compensatory tool which may be especially advantageous for poorer students. Feedback from students The end-of-term survey was used to gather information on students’ reactions to the use of LTIs. Figures 4 and 5 summarize students’ perceptions of the impact of LTIs and LTI quizzes, respectively, on awareness of content knowledge, ease of learning course material and final grades. What is striking to us is that nearly half of the students agree that LTIs and LTI quizzes had a large impact on their awareness of what they did or did not know (88-90% agreed they had at least some impact) , but only 10-20% of students believe this contributes significantly to making course material easier to learn or to their final grades. In fact, 25-33% of students believe these resources have no impact at all on ease of learning material or final grades! When asked if completing weekly LTIs affected their study time for the midterm test and final exam, 72% and 74%, respectively, responded ‘NO’. In addition, 80% of students felt that use of LTIs did not change their study habits in Organic Chemistry I, and 74% did not think their study habits would change in future courses as a result of using the LTIs. However, in stark contrast to this, 72% of students said they would recommend using the LTIs in future offerings of Organic Chemistry I. Based on this feedback, we speculate that LTIs are effective at informing students about what they know and do not know, that is, they do help to develop students’ metacognitive skills, but


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they may do little to support other aspects of self-regulated learning. Many students might lack the motivation to do anything about material they do not know or they may simply not know what to do with this information.

Figure 4 Student perceptions of the impact of LTIs

Figure 5 Student perceptions of the impact of LTI quizzes


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Conclusions and Future Work To help students in an introductory organic chemistry class develop or improve metacognitive skills, we offered scaffolding in the form of nine weekly LTIs. We set out to determine optimal conditions for implementing the LTIs by varying the conditions to which students were exposed. The conditions reflected our perceived importance to student learning of metacognitive prompts, test taking and feedback. In the end, the various instructional supports in the conditions had no effect on final exam grades but the number of LTIs completed did, with students completing more LTIs achieving higher final exam grades. In fact, the LTIs offered advantages over and above those derived from prior learning. Feedback from students indicated the usefulness of LTIs in helping students assess what they knew and did not know but pointed to the need to support students in other aspects of self-regulated learning. Overall, these outcomes suggest that LTIs offer some benefits as an instructional tool. In future work, we will measure gains in metacognitive skills derived from LTIs using a pre-/post-test scenario, explore the effect of LTI frequency (i.e., weekly, biweekly, monthly), hold interviews with a subset of students to gain insight into how they utilize the LTIs and, in the long-term, develop scaffolding to support other aspects of self-regulated learning. References Benjamin, A. S.; Tullis, J. (2010). What makes distributed practice effective? Cognitive

Psychology, 61, 228-247. Ku, K. Y. L.; Ho, I. T. (2010). Metacognitive strategies that enhance critical thinking.

Metacognition Learning, 5, 251-267. Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26, 113-

125. Seymour, E.; Hewitt, N. M. (1997). Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the

Sciences; Westview Press: Boulder, CO. Biography Stephen MacNeil is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has taught introductory and intermediate courses in organic chemistry for the past 10 years, striving to convince students that organic chemistry is not the horror show it is made out to be. His research is focused on improving teaching and learning of organic chemistry in higher education. Eileen Wood is Professor of Developmental and Instructional Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research interests include assessing how learners of all ages acquire, retain and retrieve information. In particular, she examines these learning demands in the classroom context and in the context of different learning technologies.


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Lucia Zivcakova is enrolled in the Doctoral program in Developmental Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research examines the impact of multi-tasking on learning and academic integrity. Robyn Glover completed an Honours BSc Chemistry Degree at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2013. In February, 2014 she began working on a Graduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Patrick Smith completed an Honours BSc Chemistry Degree at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2013. In September, he began working toward a Bachelor of Education Degree at the University of Ottawa.


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"Place Based Tourism Curriculum: making connections to community"

Robin Reid, Thompson Rivers University

Abstract Drawing from a research project with the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and from place based curriculum and literature, this paper explores the effectiveness of a student-created half hour walking tour and postcard assignment as a way of deepening student engagement with course content and the local community. The project was designed to engage travelers and locals in the Kamloops landscape. This paper explores how the project was able to extend the learning community beyond the parameters of the university and bring both international and domestic students into public space and onto the local landscape

Introduction:

In the fall of 2012 I joined the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) Pedagogy of Place Group, which consists of ten faculty members from various disciplines. We came together as a learning community to explore the effectiveness of place based teaching and learning and to assess whether a common "place based" assignment could deepen student engagement with course content and connect students to the community where they live and study. As a group we decided that each of us would create an assignment that used postcards as a medium of expression that would connect course content to place. The title of this research project is "Postcards from the classroom: Do place-based assignment increase student engagement across disciplines? Students in biology, tourism, Anthropology, Geography, History and English were required to complete a postcard assignment. Each assignment was different, designed to meet the different learning objectives in each course. Once the courses were completed, students were invited to participate in the research by way of questionnaires, an interview, and were asked to submit their final work for analysis or display. As a faculty member in the Tourism Management department, I had been engaged in place based research within a tourism context and I was exploring ways for students to make a connection between the theoretical content of the course and the local landscape of Kamloops. A third year course entitled "Community and Cultural Issues in Tourism" in the Bachelor of Tourism Management at TRU seemed like the ideal course in which to explore these connections. I introduced students to the theoretical context of place in the tourism literature. For example, seminal authors such as Edward Relph (1976) suggest that tourists are rarely inclined to develop a "sense of place' in relation to the destinations that they visit because of the superficial nature of their experiences, the short amount of time they spend in one place and the tendency of the tourism industry to present ‘Disneyfied’ landscapes devoid of deeper meaning (Hinch and Higham, 2004; Bryman, 2004). This perspective fits into a broader discourse of modern day mass tourism as a hallmark of globalization (Jaworski and Pritchard 2005; Clifford, 1997; Salazar, 2010), which also includes commodification of local cultures, landscapes,


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products and experiences. Most locations around the world are, to some degree, drawn into the global production of goods, services, and experiences. However, there is also a desire to make sense of global themes at a local level (Salazar, 2010). Thus, one response to globalization has been a renewed interest in connection to place through alternative and sustainable forms of tourism. Within the context of my community and cultural class we explored the questions of "how do we engage tourists in the local landscapes they visit?" What role do stories of place play in creating connections to the tourist experience and the people and landscapes they visit? Stories of place are also relevant for locals to connect with their own communities and the narratives of the landscapes they pass through on a daily basis. Lucy Lippard (1997) observes that "travel is the only context in which people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighbourhoods we'd probably learn twice as much" (pg.13). The assignment for this course was also tailored to include locals as tourists.

The Assignment:

The students were introduced to an online document entitled "Sense of Place: An Interpretive Planning Handbook” edited by Carter (2001) and published in electronic format on the website of the Scottish Interpretation Network (www.scotinterpnet.org.uk). Carter (2001) describes interpretation as:

part of how we manage and understand our heritage - a wide ranging term which can include the songs and stories of an area, the grassy knolls marking the site of pre-historic settlements, the industries which give life to a town, or the mosses growing in an oak wood. Whatever it is, heritage is conserved because someone thinks it is important. Interpretation is a way of helping others appreciate that importance (pg:4)

With this document as a reference, students were required to create a half hour walking tour in downtown Kamloops as a way to engage tourists and locals in the landscape. The primary objective was that students would think about place critically and creatively and be able to ask questions about spending time in place, as locals and as tourists.

Inspiration for this assignment came from previous volunteer experience I had with the Kamloops Downtown Business Association and the Rocky Mountaineer Company. Rocky Mountaineer provides guests with a variety of high quality holiday rail packages in Western Canada. On routes through the Canadian Rocky Mountains to the West coast there are overnight stops in Kamloops. The Kamloops Downtown Business Association offers free one-hour evening tours specifically for the Rocky Mountaineer rail passengers. The tours are meant to engage tourists with the historical and cultural landscape of the area with particular emphasis on the architecture and stories of selected sites in downtown Kamloops.

Additionally, I participated in a number of walking tours offered by the Kamloops museum and I realized that walking tours would be an effective way to connect the theoretical content of the course to the local landscape, and provide a platform for the "postcards from home" component of the assignment. One of the tour guides from the museum volunteered to take my class on a half hour walking tour through downtown Kamloops. The tour guide’s intent was to give students a sample of a tour, and to highlight how she goes about finding and disseminating the historical, cultural and geographical content she selects for her tours. Students


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were also introduced to the resources available to them at the Kamloops museum and archives. The outcome of this connection to the archives was twofold. First, many of the students were not familiar with the archives and had never considered using this resource for primary research. Second, I received an email from an employee at the Museum and archives thanking me for introducing the students to the collection. He mentioned that few students from the university, particularly from the tourism programs, are using the archives for research. Building a stronger partnership between TRU and the museum and archives was a beneficial outcome of this assignment and speaks to ways in which place-based pedagogy can connect theoretical concepts of academia to the lived experiences of the local community.

The assignment was a large part of the course evaluation and was broken down into three segments; the post card 10%, the interpretive tour 15% and the written description of the tour and reflection 15%. For the interpretive tour the students were given the link to Carter, J. (2001) Sense of Place: An Interpretive Planning handbook as a guide for them to use in developing their tour. For the postcard, students were required to create a single postcard with images that reflected the theme of the tour and details of the location, time and cost of the tour. The intent was that the postcard could be placed at the Kamloops Visitor center as a souvenir of Kamloops and provide information about an interpretive tour the students had created.

At the end of the term students were required to show the postcard they created at the beginning of the tour presentation and then again at the end of the tour presentation to gain feedback from the class as to whether their postcard achieved the intended goal of creating interest in taking the tour. Both the interpretive tour and the post card act as agents of place making in that they both inscribe narratives of place on the landscape. In addition to providing a creative and theoretical connection to place, this place based assignment provided a platform for international and domestic students to share their experiences of spending time in place as locals and as tourists. According to the preliminary results from student interviews, most of the students said that they learned a lot about Kamloops through their own research as well as listening to the presentations by other students and they enjoyed interacting with the community to obtain information for their projects.

Outcomes:

The students worked in groups of three to four and presented their tour in class through video clips of their tour or slides of their tour subjects. The student tours were focused on the downtown areas of Kamloops or the areas around Thompson Rivers University. There were no geographic parameters and students were free to choose the places they wished to engage. The tours developed by the students were wide ranging and impressive. They ranged from an historical campus tour of TRU; a Kamloops community and cultural tour which began at the art gallery and ended at a local pub; a tour of Kamloops sporting facilities in the downtown centre that support Kamloops brand as "Canada's Tournament Capital"; a tour of painted murals in the downtown area entitled " Kamloops Hidden Art Projects"; two other tours used the theme of the South and North Thompson Rivers, as a geographical and cultural meeting place, significant to both the Secwepemc First Nations people and colonial development of Kamloops.

Another group, in which all the students were female, created a walking tour that highlighted the important role of women's groups such as the Afternoon Auxiliary to Royal Inland Hospital and the Women's Christian Temperance Union in conjunction with the Red Cross to bring together all classes of those in need and all denominations during the war years.


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The students wanted to show both tourists and locals how the west end of Kamloops can be seen as much more than just a place for buildings, restaurant and shopping; it can also be seen as a place where fundamental societal changes occurred; where women broke social and economic barriers and did so while helping others in need. During their presentation of the tour to the class they mentioned that "as women themselves, they connected to the theme of commemorating women's groups in Kamloops that contributed to improving community life and the wellbeing of individuals in need" (student quote, 2012).

Perhaps one of the most unexpected connections to place came from a tour created by a group of three students from China. These students created a walking tour that focused on the history of the Chinese railway workers in the development of Canada's National Railway. During their research, they discovered that some of the Chinese rail workers were from their home town in China.

As for the postcards, some students spent a great deal of time on the composition of the postcards which resulted in creative and engaging interpretations of the local landscape. In Figure 1 the students are seen standing in front of a mural painted near the back wall of an Italian grocery store in downtown Kamloops. The theme of this tour is to introduce murals painted in back alleys as hidden works of art.

Figure 1: Student postcard, 2012. (with permission)

While some students selected one colorful image as representative of the main theme of their tour others selected black and white images to reflect the historical connection to place. The group celebrating the women's contribution to community during the war years selected a nostalgic image from the internet of a tea party where three women sat naked, sipping tea at a table with fine linens and patterned tea cups while wearing pearls and hats. Needless to say the class loved this particular postcard and thought it was likely to attract the attention of both travelers and locals. There is also an interesting connection to the literature with this particular postcard and class discussion in which Jaworski and Lawson, (2005: 125) suggest that overall we


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are beginning to see as resurgence of "nostalgia as a dominant theme" in the tourist experience, where stories of the past are important to how we engage with the landscape.

One of the most challenging aspects of the "postcards from home" assignment for the faculty in the Pedagogy of Place group was figuring out how to assign grades to the postcards. For many, including myself, this creative aspect of the assignment was outside of my comfort zone. It was more subjective and outside the realm of objective outcomes associated with traditional research papers. While each of us approached the grading of the postcards differently, I used a marking rubric that was adapted from a rubric used by a place group colleague in biology. For my first attempt at this assignment, the rubric worked well as it gave me a framework to use for subjective evaluation. (See Figure 2). This is one of the advantages and enjoyable experiences (and there are many) of working as an interdisciplinary team with a common assignment. Each of us brings a different perspective to the table, but in many ways we struggle with similar challenges.

Student Names:

Post Card Marks Possible Marks Given

Actual postcard format (includes, reference to tour, place for stamp, address, message)

4

Does the imagery clearly relate to your tour of “place” 5

Does the written content clearly relate to your tour of “place” 5

Does the visual and written content compliment /support each other

5

Overall is your postcard interesting-‐ did you go the extra mile? 3

17

Figure 2: Grading Rubric for TMGT 3010 Postcard assignment

Some observations and future directions:

The Community and Cultural Issues in Tourism course is offered every fall semester and I will continue to use the interpretive tour and postcard assignment as media for engaging tourists and


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locals with the landscapes we travel through and occupy. Based on preliminary results from student reflections, questionnaires and interviews, students responded favorably to both the interpretive tour and postcard components of the assignment. Overall results indicated that they liked the “creative process” and “incorporating visual images whether it be artwork, photoshop, or photographs”. As one student stated “I will remember the postcard assignment. I won’t remember what’s on the exam” (student interview: 2013).

In response to student interest in creative expression of place, the tour requirements could be expanded to allow students to experiment with multiple formats of interpretation. For example, a geo-cashing style tour or smart phone applications are possible formats for inscribing narratives on the landscape; enhancing place based learning and deepening student engagement with course material and the local community. As one student reflected:

“I think the presentations were are great idea because it allowed all of the other students to see what each group was working on throughout the semester rather than just handing in a paper that no one would see. I loved all of the creative forms that each group included from the brochures to the videos” (student reflection, 2013).

Results from student reflections also indicated they enjoyed getting out of the classroom and interacting with the community to develop their own interpretation of place.

“By actually participating in an assignment that taught me about place and theme, I was better able to solidify the concepts in my head. Watching other groups present their tours also allowed me to view place differently through each theme. Whether they connected through the physical landscape, the history or through art, I think it really helped the class realize how people can connect to place differently whether they are locals or visitors to the area” (student reflection, 2103).

Overall, this place based assignment provided opportunities for students to deepen their engagement with course material while making connections with the historical and cultural landscape of Kamloops. Through community and industry partnerships, research, creativity and interpretation students were able to connect with the local landscape through stories that held meaning for them. I will continue to make adaptations to the assignment in response to feedback from students and community partners.

Author’s Biography: Robin is an Assistant Professor in the Tourism Management Department at Thompson Rivers University. Robin's teaching experience in sustainability and cultural issues in tourism have guided her research interests in sustainability, community engagement, cultural narrative and sense of place in urban, rural and wilderness spaces. Robin is also the recipient of the 2013/14 Teaching Excellence Award at TRU.

References:

Bryman, A. (2004). The Disneyization of society. London: Sage.

Carter, J. (Ed) 2001. Second edition with revisions published in electronic format on the website of the Scottish Interpretation Network (www.scotinterpnet.org.uk) 2001


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Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hinch, T. & J. Higham (2004) Sport Tourism Development. Clevedon: Channel View Publications.

Jaworski, A., & A Pritchard (Eds), (2005) Discourse, Communication and Tourism. Clevedon., Channel View Publications.

Lippard, L. (1999) On the Beaten Track. New York: New Press p. 13

Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.

Salazar, N. (2010). Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. New York: Berghahn.


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Mix and Match: Promoting Interdisciplinary Teaching, Learning, and Community through

Classroom-‐level Partnerships Joanne A. Fox, Natalie Baloy, and Allen Sens, University of British Columbia Abstract Developed at the University of British Columbia (UBC), UBC Mix creates interdisciplinary learning experiences for students by developing partnerships between existing courses, and between existing courses and other learning opportunities. UBC Mix connects faculty members interested in making their courses more interdisciplinary, and facilitates the creation of shared learning activities that “mix” students together. The UBC Mix project provides a model for facilitating interdisciplinary teaching and learning within existing courses and programs at colleges and universities. Introduction The benefits of interdisciplinary teaching and learning are well established (cf. Letterman and Dugan 2004; Knotts, Henderson, Davidson, and Swain, 2009; Smith and McCann 2001). Institutions of higher learning have responded by creating interdisciplinary degree programs, colleges, institutes and centres (cf. Holley et al. 2009; Klein 2009; Newswander and Borrego 2009). Individual instructors have also created courses with explicit interdisciplinary content and pedagogy (cf. Epstein 2004; Miller and Totten 2009; Newell 1994). UBC’s strategic plan, Place and Promise (UBC 2012), speaks to the importance of learning across disciplines: ‘Through rigorous study within and across disciplines, students acquire the knowledge, inquiry and communication skills, professional abilities, and understanding of other cultures that enhance their personal development and enable them to contribute and lead in a global society.’ Like most universities, UBC operates a wide variety of excellent interdisciplinary programs. However, these programs require a significant commitment of resources, and do not serve the majority of students. In addition, individual instructors often introduce interdisciplinary themes into their courses, but may be constrained by time and expertise limitations, and a lack of awareness of related teaching elsewhere in the institution. In this article, we discuss the creation and conceptual design of the UBC Mix project as a model of interdisciplinary engagement. We critically reflect on the challenges and benefits of the Mix experience, and highlight how other educators and programs can adopt this approach to promote interdisciplinarity at their institutions. How the UBC Mix Project Started The UBC Mix Project developed under the auspices of the UBC Terry Project, a program dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary education across the arts and sciences. The Terry Project manages a number of learning activities, including the annual TEDx Terry Talks Conference featuring UBC students. A 2008 TEDx presentation by Geoff Costeloe, an Integrated Sciences and Political Science double major, was the genesis of the UBC Mix project. Geoff suggested developing a strategy to bring students in different disciplines together to discuss common


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themes and problems. The Terry Project Team adopted Geoff’s idea and successfully applied to launch UBC Mix through the UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF), which provides seed funding for new educational initiatives. In Geoff’s own words, ‘My Terrytalk was about the importance of integration in university education and integrative solutions in society. With UBC Mix, I hope to create more opportunities for students to experience issues through different disciplines and work with students from different backgrounds.’ The UBC Mix Concept and Design UBC Mix was based on the value of learning across the disciplines, and the need to develop interdisciplinary instruction in ways that are accessible and achievable for most instructors. The objective of UBC Mix was to offer a mechanism for expanding and enhancing interdisciplinary opportunities for students, in a manner that is complementary with existing courses and programs. Emphasizing classroom-level learning, Mix offered a flexible and manageable solution for instructors committed to interdisciplinary instruction. The UBC Mix Project operated between 2009 and 2013. During the academic year, Mix conducted two or three regularly scheduled workshops, or “Mixers” for faculty and staff. Workshop participants shared their Mix experiences, explored the possibility of new partnerships, discussed best practices and lessons learned, and met instructors and/or program staff interested in a potential partnership. The UBC Mix project was supported by a “storefront” webpage introducing Mix to the UBC community, and a Wiki Community Portal, which served as an online space to share resources and ideas, faculty contacts, and instructional resources. The process of facilitating collaboration between participants developed into an interdisciplinary community of practice that continues to serve as a focal point for sharing experiences, a repository of examples and expertise, and a space for face-to-face discussions of potential collaborations. Instructional resources and other Mix materials are now available on the Interdisciplinary Community of Practice website (blogs.ubc.ca/ubcmix). The Mix project team was composed of two UBC faculty members and a coordinator. The faculty members provided the academic and institutional leadership for the UBC Mix project on a volunteer basis. The UBC Mix Coordinator was a part time position held by a graduate student. The Coordinator was responsible for identifying potential UBC Mix partners, connecting potential partners, engaging with educational support units on campus, developing promotional materials, maintaining the web presence, compiling and communicating Mix activity results and assessments, and facilitating Mix workshops. A core task was facilitating the logistics involved in joint class activities: booking larger classroom space, identifying a meeting time, and securing appropriate equipment. To create new “Mixes” and support existing ones, the project actively recruited and engaged instructors. This was achieved through presentations at faculty meetings, contacting potential participants based on their teaching interests, communication with teaching and learning communities of practice, and advertisements at UBC events. Once a partnership was created, the UBC Mix coordinator and/or the faculty leads communicated with both partners to provide advice on the design of a Mix idea. If necessary, the UBC Mix Coordinator searched for a suitable partner on behalf of a faculty member. If potential “Mixes” required financial support, Mix participants submitted an application for funding. Through the UBC TLEF grant, the UBC Mix project provided seed funding to support the development and implementation of Mix activities (~$500 per UBC Mix pairing), and offered support to help document and archive Mix activities, developed evaluation strategies, and provided standardized assessment mechanisms.


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Proposals were accepted twice a year and vetted by the Mix team. After the planned learning activities had taken place, participants submitted student feedback forms, which the coordinator compiled into brief assessment reports for faculty use. Faculty feedback was also compiled, and used in subsequent years to improve Mix events, procedures, and the quality of experience-based advice to Mix instructors. Examples of UBC “Mixes” By making small adjustments to “mix” their students together to explore a common theme, concept, or problem, partnered instructors created activities that enhanced learning across disciplines. Examples of such activities include common lectures, joint group projects, electronic discussions between classes, and field trips. These activities enhanced interdisciplinary communication, exposed students to new ideas, extended learning beyond a single classroom, and engaged students with communities both within and outside the University. At UBC, over twenty different UBC Mix activities reached more than 2400 students and involved partnerships between sixty courses and/or programs. Examples of past “Mixes” include: Shared Assignments Joint group research project: In a partnership between a first year History course and a Science One Biology course, instructors developed a joint assignment on native trees around campus, undertaking joint lectures, employing a shared course reading, and conducting joint film viewings. Data mash-‐ups: Students in an advanced statistics course paired up with students in Biology and the School of Population and Public Health (SPPH) to prepare statistical reports for shared term projects. The students from biology and SPPH supplied fresh data for statistics students to use in as they explored different statistical models. Students collaborated to identify statistical needs and develop appropriate statistical analyses that were mutually beneficial to both partners. Common Experiences Reading, debating, sharing: UBC Reads Sustainability, a sustainability initiative on campus, invited authors of popular books to spark interdisciplinary discussion on global environmental issues. Mix promoted the events, and encouraged instructors to incorporate the books and author visits into their courses. Courses from Anthropology, Political Science, Biology, and Engineering, among others, participated in this Mix over its three-year partnership. Film screening: An engineering course on environmental engineering and sustainability invited students enrolled in courses on film studies, the Arctic, snow and ice geology, and sustainability to watch Chasing Ice, an award-winning film about the changing Arctic landscape. After the screening, students engaged in discussion about the film from their various disciplinary perspectives. Networking


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First years fraternizing with Frankenstein: With assistance from Mix, students in two first year interdisciplinary programs, Arts One and Science One, began an annual tradition: joining together to socialize and learn from one another. One year they planned a joint dinner and lecture. Most recently, they watched the film Frankenstein and discussed its moral and scientific implications. Communicating beyond the university: TerreWeb, an interdisciplinary project designed to promote science communication, hosted two networking fieldtrips to meet partner institutions, offered innovative social media and film production workshops, and scheduled a series of lectures on public science issues. Community Engagement Learning from the experience of homelessness: In partnership with the UBC Community Learning Initiative, this multi-year Mix explored themes of poverty, inequality, and development by hosting an education specialist on homelessness and an Aboriginal man who has spent many years on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Students from Economics, Sociology, Education, and Applied Science watched a short film about his life and a lecture on homelessness before engaging in discussion. International service learning: Senior Philosophy and Sociology students travelled to Guatemala through UBC’s Go Global service learning program, participating in guest lectures by local community members and sharing readings and fieldtrips to a number of sites. Impact and Assessment Among several project evaluation measures, the key indicator of UBC Mix success has been positive student feedback and evidence of achieved learning objectives. Mix developed a standardized assessment mechanism for all UBC Mix partnerships. The Mix Coordinator collected, analyzed, and documented feedback specific to individual UBC Mix activities and developed Mix feedback reports. These reports were shared with instructors and other members of the Mix community to enhance interdisciplinary teaching practice and stimulate future Mix ideas. On Mix feedback forms, students defined interdisciplinarity and described its values from their perspectives. They emphasized that interdisciplinary learning offers new and different perspectives, opens opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaborative learning, and creates moments for ‘real’ world application, One student commented, ‘Interdisciplinary learning is a fantastic idea to expand and share knowledge across faculties that tend to be quite closed and separate.’ The majority of student respondents commented favorably on their participation in common experiences facilitated by UBC Mix. They expressed appreciation for the opportunity to engage with students from other disciplines and emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for expanding perspectives, problem-solving, and developing innovative ideas and approaches to familiar topics. According to one student, UBC Mix offers ‘a good way of meeting students who come from different learning backgrounds… this is more like what we would experience in the real world.’ Challenges and Responses


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The UBC Mix project encountered a number of challenges as it evolved, and through this experience valuable lessons were learned which informed our responses. Instructor Time Constraints Even the most dedicated instructors have practical limitations on their time and their availability for workshops, forging interdisciplinary partnerships, and changing their existing courses. The Mix project recognized this constraint by providing valuable facilitation services through the Mix Coordinator, who was available in person and by email, and by creating an online repository of examples and resources for participants. Mix workshops were held 2-3 times per year and resources featured short takeaway pieces that could be readily applied by instructors. Course Timetables and Space Holding common classes or other Mix activities was easier if partnered courses were scheduled on the same day and at the same time. While not insurmountable, scheduling problems did have a significant impact on Mix participants and activities. Similarly, the lack of available space for larger gatherings of students at popular teaching times made plenary events difficult to arrange. Mix projects adapted by holding common events later in the day, integrating events into class projects, and connecting students through electronic means. Funding The financial support provided by the TLEF program was essential for the success of the UBC Mix project. Funds from TLEF provided the salary for the Mix Coordinator and seed funding for Mixes. The ability of Mix to provide money for small expenses such as food, transportation, and guest speaker honoraria was an important part of the success of many Mix projects. Expanding the Mix Community The Mix project initially focused exclusively on course instructors. As the project developed, it became evident that units without their own teaching programs or courses were interested in Mix as a mechanism to enhance their engagement with students. In particular, representatives of the UBC Sustainability Initiative and the Community Learning Initiative became active participants in UBC Mix. Sustaining the Mix Community A final challenge was sustaining UBC Mix beyond the funding provided by the UBC TLEF grant. To this end, UBC Mix established a partnership with UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), and the UBC Mix Coordinator worked in the CTLT office to take advantage of its networking and administrative capacities. The governance of the project then transitioned into the CTLT within its community of practice framework, becoming the core foundation of the new Interdisciplinary Community of Practice (ICoP). The ICoP now meets regularly for networking events, facilitated workshops, and information-sharing sessions. Conclusion “Mixing” creates and enhances interdisciplinary teaching and learning opportunities at colleges and universities. UBC Mix offers a model for developing partnerships between instructors and courses to facilitate the creation of learning activities that bring students from different courses in


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different disciplines together in shared experiences. The Mix model has the advantage of operating within the framework of established programs and class schedules, while offering considerable flexibility in the form and shape of any given Mix project. Through Mix, the value of interdisciplinary learning can be expanded to a larger numbers of students through a very modest commitment of resources, while promoting cooperation and community among instructors interested in interdisciplinary teaching. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the following students for their involvement, Brendan Clyde, Geoff Costeloe, Sam Fenn, Claudia Goodine, Lydia Jones, and Jonathan Strang. We thank all of our colleagues who engaged with UBC Mix, particularly Luisa Canuto, Chad Hyson, and David Ng who helped us champion the project. We also acknowledge support from UBC students provided by the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund. Biographies Joanne Fox is a Senior Instructor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. Joanne was co-lead for the UBC MIX project. Natalie Baloy is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. Natalie was the UBC MIX project coordinator from 2011-2013. Allen Sens is a Professor of Teaching in the Department of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. Allen was co-lead for the UBC MIX project. References Holley, K. A. (2009). Special issue: Understanding interdisciplinary challenges and opportunities

in higher education. ASHE Higher Education Report, 35, 2, 1-131. Epstein, M. J. (2004). Teaching a "humanistic" science: Reflections on interdisciplinary course

design at the post-secondary level. Current Issues in Education, 7, 3, 1-11. Klein, Julie Thompson. (2009). Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures: A Model for

Strength and Sustainability. John Wiley & Sons. Knotts, G., Henderson, L., Davidson, R. A., & Swain, J. D. (2009). The Search for Authentic

Practice Across the Disciplinary Divide. College Teaching, 57, 4, 188-196. Letterman, M. R., & Dugan, K. B. (2004). Team Teaching a Cross-Disciplinary Honors Course:

Preparation and Development. College Teaching, 52, 2, 76-79. Miller, K., & Totten, I. (2009) Developing and implementing an interdisciplinary origins course

at a state university. Journal of College Science Teaching, 38, 4, 24-29.


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Newell, W. H. (1994). Designing interdisciplinary courses. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 58, 35-51.

Newswander, L. K., & Borrego, M. (2009). Engagement in two interdisciplinary graduate

programs. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, 58, 4, 551-562.

Smith, Barbara L., & John McCann, eds. (2001). Reinventing Ourselves: Interdisciplinary

Education, Collaborative Learning, and Experimentation in Higher Education. Bolton, MA: Anker.

UBC (2012) Place and Promise: The UBC Plan, Student Learning,

http://strategicplan.ubc.ca/the-plan/student-learning/


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From Teaching Assistant (TA) Training to Workplace Learning

Cynthia Korpan, University of Victoria

Abstract In this paper, I propose a renewed look at how teaching assistants (TAs) are being prepared to fulfill their duties in higher education. I argue that the apprenticeship model of learning that is currently in use be replaced by the more holistic workplace learning approach. Workplace learning theories take into consideration the complexity of the learning situation of the TA.

The teaching assistant came into my office to talk about the work that she had been assigned. Quite distraught, she relayed how she knew nothing about the course content and did her best to

follow the guidelines provided by the course supervisor. Despite seeking teaching support, students in the TA’s lab soon began to lack confidence in her as their teacher. In turn, her

confidence was shattered and her ability to perform as a TA quickly diminished.

It is often the case that when I walk across campus, faculty will stop me to tell me his or her story about working with teaching assistants. One day, a professor told me the story about how

she had found out, due to poorly graded assignments that the TA, instead of grading the assignments herself, had delegated this to her husband, who was not affiliated with the discipline

or university.

In my role as the TA Training Program Manager at the University of Victoria (UVic), I hear many stories about TAs. No matter if the story comes from a teaching assistant (TA) or faculty member, both are seeking the same end result – that TAs do their job well. Too often a TA feels he or she is not able to fulfill his or her duties sufficiently because of a lack of skills and required knowledge, which leads to a lack of confidence and employing inappropriate methods of approaching his or her work.

My colleagues and I at institutions across North America devise programs and courses that address issues pertaining to TAs’ lack of skills and confidence. I began working in the field of teaching assistant training and graduate student professional development in 2006. At that time, one of the main foci was on programs that prepared graduate students to be faculty members. This focus was influenced by the introduction in the early 2000s of a heavily-funded program in the United States (US), called Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) that favours professional development of future faculty. Despite similar programs already existing, the development of this program helped spawn PFF-type programs at most higher education institutions in North America. UVic, as with many Canadian post-secondary institutions, had such a program put in place in the mid-2000s. The program at UVic changed in 2012 (approved by Senate in January with first intake of students in September, 2012) to become Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (LATHE), a six-unit (two 1.5 credit courses, and one 3.0 credit course) graduate certificate program that is listed on the student’s transcript (not just a notation


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in the comments section). It is jointly offered by the Learning and Teaching Centre, Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

Certificate programs that prepare future faculty are important but I contend that the focus on preparing to teach in higher education should be at the beginning, when a graduate student first steps into an instructional position in post-secondary education. The recent quality movement in higher education brings attention to how undergraduate students are being supported, especially in the first and second years of their degree. If the underlying movement is to make sure we are providing the best quality undergraduate education, then we need to focus closely on the teaching assistant role. Approximately one-third of first- and second-year courses at UVic (similar percentages must exist at other institutions) have a tutorial, discussion, or lab component that have TAs as the lead instructor.

Teaching assistant In a significant number of higher education institutions in Canada, graduate students are given the opportunity to assist a professor with instructional duties that begins their learning process about the culture of teaching at a university with its norms and responsibilities. Sometimes undergraduate students take on the role of a TA, but the focus here is strictly on graduate students. How a TA learns the duties, norms, and responsibilities of his or her work assignment is dependent on the course supervisor or other department designate. This model of learning, where a graduate student assists a professor, is termed an apprenticeship model.

In my work, I question whether the apprenticeship model is the best method of learning for the TA role in Canadian universities. From my perspective, the TA role has been conflated with the graduate student role. I propose another model of learning, called workplace learning. Workplace learning has similar features as the apprenticeship model but provides a more holistic approach to work and learning. I will first discuss the apprenticeship model, its historical roots in higher education, and recent remodeling for graduate education. I will then discuss workplace learning, and how it suits the TA role as a pedagogical method of learning.

The apprenticeship model Apprenticeship is a means of imparting specialized knowledge to a new generation of practitioners by modeling a way of being (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008). It is a reproductive model (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008) that transforms novices into experts. Apprenticeship is typically employed where there is primarily implicit knowledge to be acquired through long-term observation and experience.

Before the industrial revolution, apprenticeship was a common learning process used throughout the world (Aldrich, 1991). Even though the traditional historical forms of apprenticeship diminished in the Western world at that time, the model survived and is actively used as the best method to teach many different skills and for the transmission of knowledge (for examples consult Ainley & Rainbird, 1991; Lave, 1988; and Lave & Wenger, 1991). It is also the pedagogical method preferred in practices that deal with a lot of complexity, multiple procedures, and dynamic environments, such as in medicine, police work, and professional development (Johnson & Pratt, 1998). Many of the principles and practices of apprenticeship, sometimes referred to as internship, were applied to the university in professional areas such as medicine and law, which continue to this day (Aldrich, 1991). Additionally in the university, it took the form of the faculty “master” and the graduate student “apprentice.” TAs, as graduate students, were positioned similarly, as apprentices but termed assistants.


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Apprenticeship, as a process of learning, has received significant attention in recent years. Jean Lave based on her fieldwork studying apprenticeships of Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia, with Etienne Wenger (1991) took a renewed look at the social practice of apprenticeship to suggest that it be re-envisioned as situated learning, emphasizing that learning is not an individual cognitive process but rather an encompassing social practice.

Moreover, Lave and Wenger (1991) identify that the social practice of apprenticeship is part of a community of practice (CoP). A CoP is considered to be any activity that is shared by a group of people through a series of social relations, either work- or socially-based that occur over time to support collective learning of a common practice or profession (Wenger, 1988). One characteristic often associated with apprenticeship is that novices eventually replace experts. However, Lave and Wenger refute the expert/novice relationship historically related to apprenticeship, favouring a relationship that benefits the whole community as everyone is gaining knowledge through the interactions taking place.

To describe the apprentice’s role, Lave and Wenger (1991) coined the phrase, legitimate peripheral participation. They argue that the term defines how a newcomer is in a peripheral position because he or she is just beginning to learn the language and social rules associated with the roles in the community; legitimate because everyone recognizes the newcomer as part of the community; and lastly, that he or she will participate in ways determined by the community to be the best to ensure that he or she learns to do the activity correctly and appropriately. Legitimate peripheral participant is another way to describe the positioning of an apprentice or assistant in a learning and work situation.

Signature Pedagogies Following Lave and Wenger’s (1991) re-envisioning of apprenticeship, the apprenticeship model used in higher education to prepare graduate students has come under scrutiny. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a research and policy centre focused on improving teaching and learning in the US, recently conducted a five-year study of graduate education. The research was about the whole graduate experience, including teaching activities, and confirmed that the apprenticeship model is the signature pedagogy of graduate education (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008). The term “signature pedagogies” comes from Lee S. Shulman (2005) and is described as the “characteristic forms of teaching and learning…that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions” (p. 52). Signature pedagogies are windows into the cultures of their fields because they incorporate into the acts of teaching and learning, assumptions about how to teach knowledge and skills, such as how to think like a lawyer. The Carnegie Foundation took a hard look at the apprenticeship model used with graduate students and found that when apprenticeship works well, it can be an incredibly powerful experience, but withstanding that, they question whether it is the best model to use, and if not, what would be better.

TAs as apprentices Today, at most Canadian universities, a significant number of the graduate student population are TAs during any term (at UVic about one third for both the fall and winter terms). The duties assigned to a TA differ from department to department, institution to institution, but run the full gamut associated with a teaching position in higher education.

TA teaching has been the subject of a wide range of publications and research (for e.g., Austin, 2002a; Austin, 2002b; Bellows, 2008; Boman, 2008; Cho, Kim, Svinicki, & Decker,


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2011; Garland, 1983; Jones, 1993; Lumsden, Grosslight, Loveland, & Williams, 1988; Marincovich, Prostko, & Stout, 1998; Nyquist, Manning, Wulff, Austin, Sprague, Fraser, Calcagno, & Woodford 1999; Schonwetter, Ellis, Nazarko, & Taylor 2004; Weber, Gabbert, Kropp, & Pynes, 2007). The bulk of the information identifies topics that TAs should be exposed to, such as basic teaching preparation for higher education classrooms and suggestions on how to familiarize TAs with this content through workshops and programs. To provide this information to TAs, departments and learning and teaching centres develop training opportunities, materials, and programs. How each course supervisor prepares TAs assigned, varies greatly.

No matter how much is in place to help prepare TAs for teaching, many take up their TA role with little or no preparation. For example, a survey conducted at UVic in 2009 revealed that 65% of new TAs had not engaged in or been exposed to any teaching preparation before beginning their duties (Korpan, 2010). This means that most faculty, departments, and TAs rely on apprenticeship as the dominant learning process in order to learn how to fulfill their duties.

Problems with the Apprenticeship Model for TAs There is the assumption that TA work prepares a graduate student for future academic work. But, as a reproductive model, it continually reproduces TAs not colleagues (Long, Holberg, & Taylor, 1996). The range of complexity that is involved in being an instructor in higher education is obscured. The work experience of TAs is fragmented and does not represent the complexity of being the professor for a complete course. Therefore, a professor does not provide the best mentor for TAs in an apprenticeship model; actually, an experienced TA provides the best mentorship for TA work.

Typically, one professor is responsible for preparing a student to be a TA (Long, Holberg, & Taylor, 1996), which besides being a time consuming task for the professor, gives only one perspective on how to approach particular issues that surface during the term of an assignment.

Further, there is a rigid differential in status and power between a professor and TA (Long, Holberg, & Taylor, 1996): the TA is bound to work and learn from the professor but limited in his or her ability to suggest different approaches to the work assigned.

Also, the learning taking place is often uni-directional, determined solely by the professor (Long, Holberg, & Taylor, 1996). While the TA does learn through practical experience, he or she is "under" professors who are skilled, the TA him- or herself being a "novice." In terms of teaching, if a TA gets the chance to guest lecture, the TA is entering someone else's classroom for a short time but is always under the direction of the professor (Long, Holberg, & Taylor 1996).

Additionally, most training provided for TAs is primarily focused on skill- and rule-based actions (Ainley & Rainbird, 1991; Coy, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Skill-based actions do not require a lot of subjective attention and are learned in order to maintain the norm of that skill. Rule-based actions are based on rules or procedures that can be easily adapted and revised as needed but only enough to maintain the rule. These actions are informed by the goal to change and manage behaviour. Most initial TA training is not designed to promote conceptual or developmental change, or encourage reflective practice.

The apprenticeship model is problematic, not just for TAs, but as the Carnegie Foundation found, for all graduate students. However, as they argue, it is the signature pedagogy of graduate education, but TA work is not part of graduate education; TA work is an academic job available to graduate students while pursuing their graduate degree.


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Workplace Learning The field of workplace learning is centered on the holistic complexity of the learning situation. A workplace learning approach takes into account the institution, mentor(s), TAs, students, and the overall context of the learning situation during the work assignment. This approach positions the working and learning role of the TA as continually changing as the TA becomes an educator in higher education.

Research in this area has looked at how and where learning is taking place in the workplace (Hager, 2011). Through this research, suggestions have been made as to how to best support and implement learning at work. An expansive/interleaved process is an example.

Expansive means providing the learner/worker with active participation in the community of practice, breadth of access to experience, paid time to engage in education, gradual transition from low risk to high risk tasks, institutional recognition that the worker is a learner, clear learning goals and personal learning plan, and more than sufficient support materials (Fuller & Unwin, 2003).

Rather than focusing on one topic, the interleaved process involves exposure to abstract knowledge combined with exposure to situations to use the knowledge. In between the leaves of experience, is exploration of concepts related to the experience. This forefronts implicit learning and suggests that it should precede explicit or symbolic forms of learning, meaning that conceptual learning should be hung on an experiential structure rather than the other way around (Allix, 2011).

Conclusion TAs occupy a unique position in higher education institutions: they are in a short-term work relationship, do not require any prior training or knowledge to perform the duties assigned, and assignment of a TA position provides funding as a paid job. The way in which graduate students fulfill this unique position is dependent upon the culture of the department, the duties assigned by the course supervisor, and his or her own experience and approach.

In this article, the apprenticeship model for TA preparation as currently practiced in most Canadian institutions is questioned and a workplace learning approach is put forward. The apprenticeship model currently used for graduate education is already under question and that a re-envisioning is needed (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008). Workplace learning theories, such as expansive (in opposition to restrictive) and interleaved, provide the necessary structure to enhance TA preparation. The expansive approach (Fuller & Unwin, 2003) is simply good pedagogical practice in any situation and the interleaved approach (Allix, 2011) is appropriate for TA work because TAs are in a learning situation where they are naturally positioned to hang the conceptual on the experiential.

The addition of a workplace learning approach to TA programming was first implemented this past fall (2013). An expansive and interleaved process was embedded in the Teaching Assistant Consultant (TAC) program that positions a lead TA mentor in most departments. In the following ways, it demonstrated the effectiveness of taking a workplace learning approach to TA teaching preparation. TACs provided new TAs with access to a multitude of resources, including instruction that was sequenced and delivered to TAs as the term progressed. In addition, TACs observed TAs teaching within the first few weeks (if applicable), which included a pre-observation meeting to discuss goals of the teaching session and a post-observation meeting to provide encouragement and feedback to the new TA. The


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TAC repeated teaching observations as required and necessary. Throughout the term, TACs were available to TAs for additional resources, one-on-one meetings, guidance at any time for consultation about TA duties, and provided additional instruction when TAs requested. The initial stages of implementing a workplace learning approach, using theories developed in this burgeoning field of study, has proven to offer TAs the support they need in order to enhance their introduction to teaching in higher education. In order to test the effectiveness of taking a workplace learning approach to TA teaching preparation, a research study will be conducted beginning in the fall of 2014 that will specifically look at the learning process TAs go through as they learn how to teach, with the aim to integrate further theories from the field of workplace learning.

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Aldrich, R. (1991). The Apprentice in History. In P. Ainley & H. Rainbird, (Eds.), Apprenticeship: Towards a New Paradigm of Learning (pp. 15-26) London: Kogan Page.

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Austin, A. E. (2002b). Preparing the next generation of faculty: Graduate school as socialization to the academic career. The Journal of Higher Education, 73(1), 94-122.

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A multi-‐perspective examination of the barriers to field-‐placement experiences for students with disabilities

Tara Flanagan, Fiona J Benson, Frederic Fovet, McGill University Introduction Changes are occurring rapidly within Higher Education to include real-world experiences and evaluations as core components of professional programs (Zunker, 2006). This new focus on providing more opportunities for learning in authentic community settings is thought to promote better pedagogy by focusing on multiples perspectives and areas of expertise (Zeichner, 2010) and to increase opportunities in the workplace by promoting practical and flexible skills that are essential in the field (Bogo, 2010; Buhai, 1999; Dreuth & Dreuth-Fewell, 2002; Getzel, 2008). This emerging shift in curricular foci is co-occurring with changes in the demographic composition of the student body in most post-secondary institutions. On the whole, campuses are becoming more inclusive and are increasingly welcoming students from a variety of backgrounds and with different types of disability.

Historically, students with disabilities were considered to be the responsibility of a dedicated “office for students with disabilities” where they received services and accommodations. Unfortunately, this model created the view that there is a unified endpoint and approach to disability service provision. It is misguided to conclude that disability service provision is unchanging, context-independent, and an island unto itself. Research on different models of service provision suggest that students with disabilities tend to fare better in post-secondary environments that implement a Universal Design approach where multiple stakeholders are responsible for meeting the needs of a diverse student body (Getzel, 2008; Lightfoot & Gibson, 2005). Student profiles, perspectives, and expectations are changing as rapidly as the demands in the field and of community partners (Pardeck, 2002). This new focus on real world experiences in post-secondary education challenges the traditional philosophies of service provision and provides an opportunity for reflection and change (Tynja¨la¨, Va¨limaa & Sarja, 2003). As we increasingly embrace the Social Model of Disability in higher education where we discuss external barriers to education and access and where environment-focused models such as Universal Design become implemented (Gradel & Edson, 2010), we should be asking whether environmental barriers continue into real-world contexts (Burgstahler, 2008). The notion of a smooth, seamless transition to the field for students with disabilities seems utopic (Harrison& Ip, 2012). Yet, the current models of service provision and teaching and learning seem to poorly prepare students for this complex transition. It is this frustrating observation that led us to come together on a collaborative brainstorming project regarding field placements for students with disabilities.

We asked ourselves: Are traditional access solutions in line with the demands in the real world? Are field placements, the focal connection point between academic and professional worlds any less fraught with access issues than traditional approaches to education? Do traditional access solutions meet the needs of students with disabilities and/or of field and community partners?


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Context Though there is a general paucity of data on this topic, the research that is available focuses on the perspectives of field supervisors who tend to report on the numerous barriers that seem to be present in the field for students with disabilities. For example, Alperin (1988) queried more than 300 directors of fieldwork in accredited Social Work programs to conclude that almost 60% reported barriers related to transportation and/or to acceptance within the agencies where their students were placed. Reeser (1992) interviewed 12 field placement supervisors in Social Work who reported on the rampant systemic discrimination, inflexibility, and prejudice that created barriers for their field placement students with disabilities. In response to this situation, scholars in the area are calling for a collaborative effort to engage all stakeholders in the process of defining criteria for excellence in field placement components of academic programs (Buhai, 1999; Cole, Christ & Light, 1995), to be proactive during the pre-placement phase (Alperin, 1988), and to form effective partnerships between academic and community partners that have a mandate of promoting equity (Reeser, 1992).

To better illustrate our contention that the current models of service provision and teaching and learning seem to poorly prepare students for this complex transition from program to field, we share some of the challenges faced by the current field service component of the university teacher preparation program that falls under the purview of the Office of Student Teaching (OST). The OST has based its evolution over the past decade on models of excellence in the educational milieu (Beck & Kosnik, 2006; Cochran‐Smith, Feiman‐Nemser, & McIntyre, (Eds.), & Demers, (Assoc. Ed.), 2008; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2006) – and recognizes that, in the words of Darling-Hammond, the practical field-Based component of any teacher preparation program is "the glue for powerful preparation" (2006, p. 152).

In the past five years, the OST has seen an upsurge in the number of pre-service teachers with disclosed and undisclosed disabilities placed in field experiences which are largely evaluated by school partners (cooperating or associate teachers) who may or may not be familiar with, or receptive to, the needs of these students. This phenomenon is due in part to the limited information regarding how best to accommodate these more nuanced and flexible skills in the field, if at all (Benson, Fovet, & Flanagan, 2013). The OST is acutely aware of, and proactive in responding to, the requirement for the provision of professional development within school communities to integrate and support increasing numbers of student teachers who present with a range of disability and difference (Watkinson & Chalmers, 2008). Data Collection and Observations Our research project, prompted by our own observations of the barriers to equity for field placement students with disabilities at our institution, is an attempt to reflect on our disability service and teaching and learning practices. We wanted to expand on the focus of the available research by: 1) creating a multi-dimensional cross-sector collaboration between a faculty member in Educational Psychology, the Director of the Office for Student Teaching (OST), and the Director of the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD); and, 2) including the perspectives of Professional Program Directors (n=5), Field Placement Coordinators (n=26), and students with disabilities (n=29).


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Professional Program Directors Program Directors from a variety of professional programs reported on their observations regarding barriers to successful field placements for students with disabilities. Our qualitative data highlight that professional program directors feel overwhelmed and disempowered, and that they generally view the barriers from a Medical Model perspective (i.e., as being inherent to the individual). There is also a tangible fear that the growing friction caused by access issues may lead to the loss of some field partners and of a narrowing of opportunities for the students in their respective programs. The following are some illustrative anecdotal comments collected from Program Directors “Every year students seem to present more and more with disabilities especially mental health and learning disabilities which affects their work and ability to function in the field.” “…good time management is required which may be an issue for some.” “…sometimes they ask to not be placed in hospital settings…but we can’t accept such requests…” Field Placement Coordinators Similarly, we asked Field Placement Coordinators about the barriers to successful field placements for students with disabilities. This group also seemed to be struggling to find effective solutions, tended to be unsure about the legal components of the process (e.g., protections afforded to students with disabilities in matters such as disclosure), and erred on the side of exclusion. The following are some of the anecdotal comments that were recorded: “our mentoring must include forming a relationship that facilitates his/her field experience.” “I believe that Field Supervisors should be sensitized to the student’s disability...” “Disclosure. Extra support visits.” “Place them in an appropriate setting so that they can succeed.” “I do not feel that all disabilities can be adapted to the teaching profession.” Students with Disabilities We explored the perspectives of students with disabilities through quantitative and qualitative techniques. We found that students with disabilities largely feel underprepared for their professional field placements, experience or expect to be experiencing barriers in their field placements and then in the world of employment upon graduation. In a recent quantitative poll of 61 students with disabilities from the OSD who were participating in or preparing for field placements, 50% reported either experiencing or fearing barriers in field placements and 48% reported that they had concerns about barriers in employment upon graduation. Table 1 depicts the responses to a follow-up question geared at this subsection of the 61 respondents (N=29) who indicated that they were concerned about barriers in employment. 72% of whom reported being concerned about the barriers, 45% reported that they were anticipating the barriers to be the same as at the university, and 66% expected new barriers to emerge in employment environments. Unfortunately, only 17% reported receiving any kind of support to prepare for the transition into employment and the anticipated barriers.


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Table 1 Percentage of respondents who identified with the following statements

Q21. Which of the following statement(s) apply to you? (Check all that apply)

N % of Respondents

13 45% I believe the barriers in employment will be the same as I am experiencing at the university.

19 66% I expect to experience new barriers in employment.

21 72% I have concerns about barriers in employment.

5 17% I am currently receiving support to prepare for or to remove barriers in employment.

29 Total # of Respondents

Additional qualitative data were collected through ongoing dialogue between the students with disabilities and access advisors at the OSD. These data were analyzed for common themes and highlight the following issues: 1) students with disabilities are generally not focusing on nor preparing for the changing nature of the environment as they embark on field placements; 2) students report feeling that access issues are no longer the responsibility of the OSD once they enter the field even though they continue to be enrolled in field placements as part of an academic program; 3) students often report experiencing additional barriers in accessing support services during the field placement component of their programs (e.g., restricted opening hours, geographical distance from campus, and lack of perceived connections between disability unit and the field environment). Informing models of teaching and learning Our findings regarding the field placement experiences of students with disabilities highlight the need to explore solutions from a variety of perspectives and to revisit and revolutionize our approaches to disability service provision and to teaching and learning in order to meet the needs of students and of field partners. All of the stakeholders who participated in this query reported barriers to success for field placement students with disabilities, saw few solutions, and anticipated the barriers to continue into the world of employment. It seems clear that the traditional approaches to teaching and learning and to disability service provision are missing the mark with regard to supporting all students in their quest to attain equitable real-world experiences that open doors to meaningful employment opportunities.

It is important to collectively resolve to promote equity and inclusion both on campus and in our community partnerships (Alperin, 1988; Buhai, 1999; Cole, Christ & Light, 1995; Reeser, 1992). This study provides a precious example of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Occasions when student service personnel collaborate with faculty members on research projects and share their insights into service provision and teaching and learning are far too rare. This has been a hugely enjoyable process for the collaborators in this study and we sincerely hope that others


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will feel compelled to collaborate on this type of research using field placements as the catalyst for evaluation and significant change in their post-secondary institutions. References Alperin, D.E. (1988). The physically disabled BSW student. Journal of Teaching in Social Work,

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Bogo, M. (2010) Achieving Competence in Social Work through Field Education. Toronto,

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Gradel, K. & Edson, A.J. (2010). Putting universal design for learning on the higher ed agenda. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 38, 111-121.

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Lightfoot, E., & Gibson, P. (2005). Universal Instructional Design: A new framework for accommodating students in social work courses. Journal of Social Work Education, 41, 269- 277. Pardeck, J.T. (2002) A commentary on the admission and retention of students with disabilities in social work programs, Journal of Social Work in Disability and Rehabilitation, 1, 3–13.

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Tynja¨la¨, P., Va¨limaa, J. & Sarja, A. (2003) Pedagogical perspectives on the relationship between higher education and working life, Higher Education, 46, 147–166. Watkinson, A. M., & Chalmers, D. (2008). Disability, professional unsuitability and the profession of Social Work: A case study, Montréal, QC : CREPUQ.

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collected essays on learning and teaching - volume 4

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