Proposal Title
Discipline-based educational development: examples from four Canadian universities
Session Type
Panel Discussion
Room
Somerville House, room 2355
Start Date
13-7-2023 11:30 AM
End Date
13-7-2023 12:20 PM
Keywords
educational development, STEM Education Centre
Primary Threads
None of the Above
Abstract
"Discipline-based educational development", integrating the principles of teaching and learning with specific content knowledge of a discipline, is emerging as a complement to more traditional, centralized models of teaching support, bringing with it its own advantages and challenges. Partly, it is a question of belonging: it helps to be part of a team of people - possibly with a variety of specialties in areas like curriculum, pedagogy, educational technology - and operating from a centre offers this important support, but coming from a single unit across campus may make it harder to connect with those teaching in departments. Conversely, working in a department creates many opportunities to connect with faculty and students, but can be isolating as there is unlikely to be a team of any size at the department level doing similar work.
This panel discussion will explore four examples of discipline-based educational development at Canadian universities, highlighting successful initiatives and challenges faced by educators in implementing this approach. In one case, teaching is transforming via graduate student projects within specific courses, and the others have variations on teaching centre models with different levels of connections to departments - in one case with staff members embedded in departments. We will also be interested to learn of other models from those who attend the discussion. Overall, this panel discussion aims to raise awareness of the value of discipline-based education development in STEM education and to provide a platform for dialogue and collaboration among educators and educational developers in Canadian post-secondary institutions.
Elements of Engagement
We have a series of questions that we will aim to answer as panelists but we also want to learn of other models/examples from the attendees and their institutions. Examples of what we will aim to talk about/collect:
- What are the merits of a discipline-based centre/approach?
- What do these particular educational developers do?
- How are they connected and to whom (e.g., conduit between central and department level)?
- Funding/Resources/Location?
- What are the models that are out there (e.g., what combination of faculty and/or staff and/or other positions, is there a hub)?
- Examples of strategies (e.g., train grad students, have liaisons in a central university unit, have a specific unit at the faculty/college level, have anyone at the department level, secondments of faculty members)
The activity in the session may take the form of prompts like:
When it comes to teaching and learning, what are things that you ask your colleagues about? What are things that you ask educational developers about? (For educational developers in attendance, what are things they are likely to be asked about or not asked about?)
This will help shape the discussion about the relative advantages of discipline-based and more centralized forms of teaching support. We will ask people to talk these over in groups or have some individual way for people to submit answers and have them all collected together.
Links/citations that we provide will be provided with the slide deck as part of the session (we will make this available as part of the session, such as a link for online participants) and we will update this after the session with sharable ideas/links that arise from the session.
Creative Commons License
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Discipline-based educational development: examples from four Canadian universities
Somerville House, room 2355
"Discipline-based educational development", integrating the principles of teaching and learning with specific content knowledge of a discipline, is emerging as a complement to more traditional, centralized models of teaching support, bringing with it its own advantages and challenges. Partly, it is a question of belonging: it helps to be part of a team of people - possibly with a variety of specialties in areas like curriculum, pedagogy, educational technology - and operating from a centre offers this important support, but coming from a single unit across campus may make it harder to connect with those teaching in departments. Conversely, working in a department creates many opportunities to connect with faculty and students, but can be isolating as there is unlikely to be a team of any size at the department level doing similar work.
This panel discussion will explore four examples of discipline-based educational development at Canadian universities, highlighting successful initiatives and challenges faced by educators in implementing this approach. In one case, teaching is transforming via graduate student projects within specific courses, and the others have variations on teaching centre models with different levels of connections to departments - in one case with staff members embedded in departments. We will also be interested to learn of other models from those who attend the discussion. Overall, this panel discussion aims to raise awareness of the value of discipline-based education development in STEM education and to provide a platform for dialogue and collaboration among educators and educational developers in Canadian post-secondary institutions.