This study examined new faculty members' perceptions and approaches to student supervision and mentoring as related to their own experiences as doctoral students. Previous research has examined the graduate student-supervisor/mentor relationship but has yet to examine its impact on subsequent graduate student practices when they enter academic…

Student readiness continues to be an issue among the professoriate (Cramer, 2010; Greenberg, 2010; Kelley, 2010). Enrolment growth trends in Canadian universities suggest this concern may remain prevalent for some time (Overall, 2011). At the secondary level, government bodies have developed and implemented policies and standardized assessment…

This article examines the use and benefits of communities of practice (CoPs) in academic settings. In the 2010-2011 academic year Teaching Support Services at Wilfrid Laurier University introduced four theme-based CoPs for faculty and academic support staff after a successful pilot initiative. This article explores our motivation for focusing our…

King and Knight (2010) argue that English Studies' instructors must "articulate and develop their tacit assumptions [about English teaching] and create a discipline-grounded idiom for pedagogical research and reflection" (p. 323). We suggest that the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) invites English educators to reflect more…

At the beginning of my academic journey I held the belief that I would learn to teach simply by teaching. To my dismay, I had underestimated the complicated nature of teaching in higher education and gave little consideration to the ways students learn. Feeling overwhelmed by my situation, I began questioning my teaching practices and student…

Revealing the core of a teaching philosophy is the key to a concise and meaningful philosophy statement, but it can be an elusive goal. This paper offers a visual, kinesthetic, and holistic process for expanding the horizons of self-reflection, self-analysis, and self-knowledge. Mystery montage, a variation of visual mapping, storyboarding, and…

This project built upon the AchieveAbility initiative, which develops materials and training for teaching specific learning difference learners in schools and colleges. AchieveAbility devised the concept for the "InCurriculum" Project and brought together a consortium of United Kingdom higher education institutions to deliver the…

The objective of this paper is to share with other educators a teaching method that was developed to help graduate students, and potentially undergraduate students, understand how to properly reference and cite academic papers. In an attempt to teach rather than reprimand, a new teaching practice was developed for a graduate class at the…

In this paper, I explain the components of "exhilarated learning," a model for effective classroom environments, and show how this model can be applied to the broader context of community-university engagement. I describe the following three dimensions: human connection, whole body engagement, and linking content to context; and I…

This essay synthesizes our roundtable discussion about how to develop a campus culture of undergraduate research. Our discussion began with descriptions of the University of Alberta, Augustana's initiatives: Independent Studies courses, the Student Academic Conference, and summer research assistantships. Common concerns from roundtable…

A problem common to university faculty and students is an implicit sense of inadequacy regarding institutional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries. Through a focus on multidisciplinarity, learning communities enable members to navigate multiple points of view within, between, and beyond apparent institutional boundaries. After having led a…

A field-based course in an applied science program can have numerous learning outcomes. These are typically addressed through demonstration, active participation by the students, communication between students and instructor and amongst students, and independent work by students individually or in small groups. Such courses are also opportunities…

This essay explores and presents strategies we, as Canadian faculty facilitators of a teaching practicum in Kenya, used to foster the pre-service teachers' knowledge and understanding of critical reflection and transformative learning processes by using arts-based activities. Participation in the arts-based activities while in Kenya encouraged the…

This paper provides an example of an innovative solution to program development that addresses the diverse needs of teacher educators throughout various geographical locations in Florida, through a collaborative multi-university, multi-agency teacher training program funded by one collaborative grant. In this time of economic uncertainties,…

Many environmental educators and philosophers have identified anthropocentrism and the socially constructed separation between humans and "the more-than-human world" (Abram, 1996) as primary root causes of current ecological devastation. This separation is embedded in Western schooling content and structures and is often unintentionally…