Educators face similar challenges
Fred Szabo and Janette Barrington soaked up some English culture while at a conference last summer.
courtesy of Fred Szabo
University teachers belong to perhaps the only profession with no direct certification or training.
Janette Barrington, Teaching Consultant at our Centre for Teaching and Learning Services (CTLS) made this observation while discussing her participation at this summer’s International Consortium for Education Development (ICED) held in Sheffield, England.
Barrington attended the conference with Journalism teacher Barry Lazar and Fred Szabo, of Mathematics and Statistics. The trio presented innovative teaching methods to an enthusiastic group of teaching trainers.
“It was the first time I was able to present at a conference with faculty,” Barrington said. The event was attended by teaching trainers from 22 countries.
Barrington was struck by how universities around the world are all addressing similar concerns. “We often say that the main challenge at Concordia is diversity. But guess what? It’s everywhere, and a reflection of the democracy of higher education.”
Lazar saw other commonalities among the conference participants. Some had trained as education experts, while others taught in other fields before devoting more time to teaching teachers than students.
In a report on his experiences in Sheffield, Lazar noted that participants shared “a universal optimism about their work… and a near-universal concern that their work as faculty teachers was under appreciated by their institutions.” That concern in a publish-or-perish environment where research is rewarded with funding is probably not misplaced.
Barrington presented a second paper on her doctoral research (she defended her dissertation over the summer as well). Her research proposed a collaborative process for university course design. She explored how various stakeholders, including learning and technology specialists, the course teacher, a former student and representative from the library, could work together to refine a course.
Barrington was inspired at the ICED conference by trends elsewhere. In England, the government is supporting efforts to ensure that new professors are trained in pedagogy. In Australia, it’s the universities themselves who fund that training.
Lazar is reconsidering teaching models on a broader scale. With increased mobility and technology, traditional lectures with professor and students in the same room on a weekly basis may become anachronistic. “[Students] do have time to learn however and on their time, not ours,” he wrote.
The CTLS has also revamped its array of resources. This is the first year they will offer the Scholarly Teaching Enhancement Program (STEP) designed to help all faculty improve their teaching skills or incorporate new methods and models.
For instance, STEP will offer a brown bag lunch series to allow new faculty to exchange on everything from classroom challenges to a bilingual urban environment. Barrington would also like to formalize ways for professors who have earned teaching recognition to open up their classrooms to other interested faculty.