Works in this theme attend to the shifting roles, relationships, and identities that shape life in universities. We explore how academics and students come to be -how their ways of knowing, acting, and belonging are imagined, performed, contested, and held. Work in this theme traces the emergence of new subjectivities and asks how these reshape wider understandings of higher education’s purpose, the nature of academic work, and what it means to learn. In this space, identity is not fixed but continually made and remade through practice, context, and the everyday encounters that make up university life.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Why SoTL? Why a Reading Group? While many educators at Western are passionate about their teaching and care deeply about student learning, we also know that many of us do not receive formal training or development in teaching, or in learning and curriculum design. In fact, when we land in the classroom, we may have a tendency to reproduce or react against our own experiences as learners assuming what worked for us as students, works for the students in front of us. And we are sometimes puzzled and frustrated by what’s going on. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) invites us to take a step back and to see learning in our classrooms as spaces for systematic inquiry.
As a collaboration between the Critical Pedagogies Research Group (CPRG) in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of SABEL and the Learning and Teaching Portfolio, this Reading Group is intended to be a like-minded community where we learn and engage with SoTL’s nuances. While producing scholarly outputs is one component of SoTL, that singular focus tends to skirt around some of its key and more interesting educational debates.
Reading together is intended to expand our thinking, test our assumptions, and to support us in developing more robust theories and concepts about the relationship between our teaching and student learning so that our classrooms are rich spaces for experimentation and inquiry.
