Dr. Dahl, Professor and Senior Associate Dean, Faculty and Research, in the Sauder School of Business, was also named one of only four professors globally to make the short list for the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Business Professor of the Year Award. Dr. Dahl is the Fred H. Siller Professor in Applied Marketing Research, and has co-created a New Venture Design course for business and engineering students at UBC.

We had the opportunity to ask Dr. Dahl a few questions about his teaching philosophy and experiences. Here’s what he had to say.

Q: What is your teaching philosophy?

Darren Dahl (DD): My teaching philosophy rests on a deep commitment to student engagement that is built on a solid teacher-student partnership. This partnership is based in mutual respect, and a joint commitment to collaborative development, learning, and engagement.

When intelligent, curious students and teachers interact, the door to discovery and learning is opened. One significant barrier to achieving full bi-lateral engagement, however, is the inability of the teacher to identify what motivates, captures the attention, and awakens students’ imagination. Thus, I focus on aligning these three elements that are so integral to student commitment and positive, long lasting, learning outcomes. My perspective on student motivation, attention, and imagination is based in four central themes that I invoke every time I approach a new teaching assignment: 1) passion; 2) innovation; 3) dialogue; and 4) challenge.

Foremost is the need for communicating the passion and energy one has for the subject matter to students. When teachers are excited about the material they relate verbally, in writing, and in their evaluation techniques, student enthusiasm for the subject matter becomes contagious. We all enjoy listening to and watching someone who is passionate about a message, and want to engage in the subject matter as a result. Passion demands attention, is infectious, and motivates.

The second theme, innovation, has been demonstrated to me as a result of my own academic research in creativity where I have learned that consumers place a high value on innovative goods and services. Consumers of education are no different. They respond enthusiastically to creative approaches in the classroom; a place where I infuse my philosophy of teaching into every innovative in-class activity I implement. My techniques develop engaged students who eagerly anticipate my classes, as evidenced by my high attendance statistics. I know that innovation is not developed solely by employing technology in the classroom, but is cultivated through the combining of technology, more traditional approaches to teaching, and knowledge of current educational pedagogy as articulated by Brookfield, (1995), for example.

Innovation and passion are enhanced by the development of a learning environment that enables healthy dialogue and reflection among all classroom participants, including myself. Questioning, disagreement, and lively discussion are cultivated in my classrooms where students feel safe enough for this dialogue to occur. I achieve a high level of student involvement through the right balance of humor, energy, and effective listening; all exemplary teaching skills that encourage students to become partners in their own learning. Most of my classes are technology-free and dialogue-based, which means that all students become part of the conversation. My focus on dialogue also means effective communication outside the classroom is maintained and realized through timely interaction in person, via email, text, and other forms of communication.

Finally, a commonality across the various courses I teach is the demand for a high level of performance from my students. It is my belief that students are waiting to be challenged by their education and it is my role to set a bar that is realistic but high. For example, I employ the “Socratic” method in case analysis and develop assignments that push their comfort boundaries, such as suggesting students aggressively dispute common conventions, then report their reasons and findings to the class. My experience has taught me that students appreciate a course that acknowledges their intellect through rigor, reflection, and mutual respect.

Q: Do you have any advice for new faculty just starting out in teaching? Any tips or experiences you could share that helped you along the way?

DD: My advice? Watch other people teach, decide what is going to work for you, and develop your skills. I think good mentors that give you time and ideas can be very helpful. To this day, I enjoy watching other people teach…it gives me new ideas and challenges the way I see teaching happen.

Q: Have you worked with CTLT on any teaching and learning projects or initiatives?

DD: Sadly, not a lot to report here. I have taken courses (back when the unit was called TAG) and that did help me grow in my teaching abilities. I am now meeting with the 3M council/group here on campus and look forward to involvement with that body.

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

For the majority of classroom-based, blended, and distance learning environments, student assessment is provided by instructors or trained teaching assistants (TAs), often with the aid of well-designed evaluation rubrics to guide the process. With the emergence of MOOCs, one of the greatest challenges has been to find a student assessment model that works at a much larger scale, with potentially tens of thousands of students in a course.

Peer assessment is central to Introduction to Systematic Program Design. Gregor emphasizes the need for fair, substantive feedback. “The role of assessment is for students to know how they are doing,” he remarks. “We have got to get it right.”

Introduction to Systematic Program Design is an introductory programming course that teaches a design method which allows students to approach complex programs in a systematic way. “This design method, because it’s based on theoretical results about the nature of programs, produces well structured programs,” explains Gregor. “What we want to know is not just that your program worked,” he elaborates, “but that you followed our design method and produced a well-structured program.”

Gregor plans to use peer-based, rather than computer-based assessment methods, so that the feedback provided by the assessment is useful for the student. For his on-campus version of this course at UBC, Gregor is able to work with a team of TAs to assess student work. The challenge has been coming up with a rubric that works for peer-based assessment in a MOOC.

At first, Gregor started with a very rich assessment rubric to replicate the depth of grading done by TAs in the on-campus version of the course. “It was a really good rubric, totally fair,” he notes. Over time, however, he had to simplify his assessment strategy in order to make it work in the MOOC peer assessment model. “We realized that wasn’t going to work, because MOOC students might not have enough commitment to the grading to invest that much effort into it” he says.

Gregor is now exploring the use of a binary rubric, where every item is awarded a zero or full point – it is either right or wrong. Such a rubric is quite different from his on-campus version of the course. “We try, when we grade at UBC, to have a very rich rubric that allows the TAs to reward partial credit,” says Gregor. The TAs are well trained and spend a large amount of time learning how to properly grade assignments. “They are told to not just give a grade,” Gregor states, “but also to coach.” He also mentions that his TAs often point out common misconceptions, and encourage students to think about the problem from a different point of view. With such a large number of students in his MOOC, it isn’t possible to have TAs grading all of the student work or giving in-depth feedback. However, with students doing the peer assessment, one cannot expect the same type of feedback that one would get from a trained TA. Therein lays the challenge. “There is no way a peer grader is going to have that kind of knowledge,” explains Gregor.

The rubric has now been revised in an effort to make it easier for students to understand the peer assessment process so that they are able to give effective feedback to their peers. Gregor feels that in the MOOC context, the peer grading process should take students about a tenth of the time of completing a problem set. If it takes any longer, he thinks that students might not be interested in completing it. As a result, Gregor is trying to find a way to make the peer assessment process approachable for the students, “but still be fair, and still be substantive.” The peer assessment has to be easy to use, but still provide value and be useful for students. For Gregor, that is the key part. “That’s the kind of balance we are looking for.”

Online peer assessment is also a way to build a community within the course. “A course isn’t a book, a course is a living, breathing, social phenomenon,” notes Gregor. With that in mind, he feels that students have to work together. “Peer assessment doesn’t so much change what we do. It’s just another vehicle for getting them to learn from each other.” This is important, not only in his on-campus course, but in his MOOC as well. Students must be active participants in their learning environment.

In addition to peer assessment, Gregor will be using a discussion forum, where students are encouraged to talk about their peer assessment, as well as post comments and links about the problem sets. “We are going to try to launch that as a way of getting some of the better feedback from the community,” remarks Gregor. He also plans to have TAs monitoring the discussion forum on a regular basis. They will help filter out questions that need an instructor response, but Gregor hopes that the majority of the discussions will happen amongst the students themselves. “We have to get the community of students to be learning from each other.” With other MOOCs, it has been shown that students are willing to step in and help others, and he hopes for this to be the case for his course as well.

Gregor feels that the peer assessment model is very valuable for students. “Peer grading is good for them, because they will learn something,” he states. “When somebody else looks at [your work], they see it fresh. People will pick up things that you will have missed.” There is a dual purpose to peer assessment: one student is able to get feedback, while the other student is exposed to a different way of writing code. He remarks, “I would say that a lot of the value is just going to be from reading other peoples’ code and going ‘oh, you did it that way.’” For Gregor, the peer assessment process does a good job of exposing students to someone else’s work. “That is where the learning is at.”

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

Now, just over one year later, there are approximately 33,000 students in 1,156 courses in Connect. No new courses are being created in WebCT Vista and, by September 2013, all of the courses across all faculties will be running in Connect. The Faculty of Medicine undergraduate Medicine program and Sauder School of Business MBA programs have launched pilot projects that use Connect’s Content and Community functionality, reporting great success and ease of use. The Jump Start orientation program for new international and Aboriginal students is piloting Connect to support their programming this year.

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) at UBC Vancouver, and the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UBC Okanagan have provided professional development opportunities for instructors throughout the migration process. Both organizations have also developed a number of resources and tools to facilitate a smooth transition to the new platform. A faculty member noted that, because of these professional development opportunities, he has a good understanding of Connect and is now able to facilitate uptake and effective and engaging use within his program.

In a further effort to facilitate a smooth transition, UBC conducted a year-long mixed-methods research study from January-December 2012 to determine users’ experiences (students and faculty) with Connect. The study provided an opportunity to better understand the users’ experiences, professional development needs, and system operations prior to the broader rollout. The research questions included:

1. What are the experiences of key user groups – students and faculty – who participated in course offerings delivered via the new Blackboard Learn 9 LMS?
2. To what extent did the structures, materials, and personnel available provide users with the support needed to work within this new LMS environment?
3. What recommendations can be made for the rollout of Blackboard Learn 9 across UBC?

The research study involved three phases: January-April 2012, May-August 2012, and September-December 2012. In each phase, students and instructors involved with courses being offered in Connect, were invited to voluntarily participate in an initial online survey and/or interview. Instructors were also invited to participate in a follow-up survey. Data from the year-long research study is currently being analyzed and a report summarizing the findings will soon be shared with the UBC community. Findings will inform the rollout of Connect at UBC, including operating procedures, professional development, and user support.

Informed by user feedback, the results of the research study, and institutional goals, there are many planned improvements and upgrades to Connect that will, over the next few months, improve the overall user experience. In May 2013, UBC will upgrade Connect from Service Pack 9 to Service Pack 11. Included in this upgrade are improvements to the user interface, a new discussion tool, and a new calendar tool. By September 2013, further upgrades are planned that will include improvements to the Assessments tool and will allow for further improvements and integrations.

Along with the upcoming improvements to Connect itself, the Sauder School of Business is implementing the Blackboard Outcomes module to support, streamline, and automate the management of outcomes assessment instruments, metrics, and data, and generate reports that can inform academic program reviews and planning. Sauder’s experiences will help inform a future university-wide implementation of the Outcomes module. UBC is also exploring the implementation of Blackboard Analytics to allow for the extraction and analysis of course and institution-level data.

A user feedback suggestion box process will be launched in May 2013 that will allow Connect users to provide feedback and ideas for improvements even after the migration to the new LMS is complete. Users will be able to submit their suggestions and to vote on and prioritize other submissions, giving the UBC community a voice in the continued improvement of the tools they use directly in teaching and learning contexts.

For more information about the LMS research project, please contact Roselynn Verwoord, CTLT Evaluation and Research Coordinator, at roselynn.verwoord@ubc.ca.

For more information about the Connect Program, please contact Tammy Yasrobi, Connect Communications Coordinator, at tammy.yasrobi@ubc.ca.

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

“How many Aboriginal students are there at UBC?”

Amy Perreault, Graeme Joseph, Thane Bonar, and Hanae Tsukada

According to Graeme and Thane, undergraduate admissions first began asking students to self identify in 1997, when the Aboriginal Admissions Policy was passed. According to Jenny Phelps, Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Aboriginal student numbers can also go back as far as 1997-98 in the Faculty of Graduate Studies. However, Jenny infers that the numbers available between 1997 and 2004 most likely represent only graduate student applicants who had already self-identified as undergraduate students at UBC. This might not encompass the actual number of all applicants who would self-identify as Aboriginal.

Graeme Joseph and Thane Bonar

I was surprised to learn from Graeme and Thane that it was only as recently as 2004 that UBC started to systematically collect data on Aboriginal student applicants. Moreover, although all self-identification data is now entered into the UBC Student Information System (SIS) in a systematic manner, Aboriginal student data continues to have serious limitations due to the fact that many Aboriginal students may choose not to self-identify. According to Thane, for some students, this decision likely stems from “experiences of racism and a distrust of government and education institutions.” Graeme echoes, “simply put, self-identifying as Aboriginal made you a target for racism, so many people took the strategy of not self-identifying (this, of course, is still a part of the everyday life of Aboriginal peoples).” Even though it is not known how many Aboriginal students actually choose not to self-identify, based on cross-checking with other sources, the First Nations House of Learning estimates that at least 30% make this choice.

Aboriginal students’ reluctance to self-identify goes beyond a personal, self-protective strategy. Government or institutional efforts to collect information on Aboriginal people has often been a disservice to them. Thane elaborates:

Whenever one sets out to count Aboriginal students, or anything for that matter, it is usually towards some end besides just having a number. It is to inform policy, make an argument, determine budgets, etc., and the Aboriginal experience in Canada has shown that these ends are not always in the best interest of Aboriginal people. It is often used, for example, to cut funding or discredit/disempower Aboriginal organizations. Moreover, these counts inherently require definitions of “Aboriginal,” “First Nations,” or “Indigenous” that are often imposed and inaccurate.

Currently, UBC has a count of Aboriginal students, broadly defined as First Nations (status or non-status), Métis, or Inuit, that it uses for statistical and policy development purposes. Thane notes that there is an understanding that the number is not perfect, but data collection is consistent year to year, so it is still meaningful. The data shows that the Aboriginal community is growing each year across both UBC campuses. However, Thane cautions that it is not known how much of the increase is due to more students self-identifying.

“It is our hope that students will feel increasingly comfortable identifying as Aboriginal to UBC,” states Thane. To that end, it is essential to ensure that the data is being collected and used in order to help students, and that the University is transparent and open about what it is collecting and why. Graeme explains further:

A lot of the work that we have done around this issue [of self-identification] is to inform students why this information is important, why it benefits them to self-identify, how we plan to use it and protect it. The benefit for self-identifying is helping us help students.

Despite the challenges of self-identification, Graeme and Thane see the value of striving to collect more accurate data on Aboriginal students for the benefit of both students and the University. The data can, for example, help the University identify the distribution of Aboriginal students across the campus and develop effective policies and programs by allocating resources appropriately.

Consultation with Thane and Graeme has led me to numerous moments of reflection and learning, but what struck me most was the challenge of “just counting” Aboriginal students, and the historical and political complexity behind it. Even though I already knew that self-identification was a sensitive issue for many Aboriginal people, I did not realize that their concerns manifest in such a concrete and significant way on this campus, in the present day. Learning about the historical and political complexities behind the number of Aboriginal students has led me to think that, for those of us who strive to understand and better support Aboriginal students, understanding the complexities should be the first step, rather than looking for any quick facts. To gain such understanding, it is invaluable to consult experts who are knowledgeable about the issues in our own institutional setting.

Acknowledgement

In addition to those who are identified in this article, I would also like to thank Kim Lawson, Reference Librarian at the Xwi7xwa Library, for her help with my literature search, and the First Nations Studies Program at UBC for their web-based resource, which contributed to enhancing my learning about Aboriginal histories in Canada.

To learn more about these initiatives and how to get involved, please contact Amy Perreault, CTLT Aboriginal Initiatives Coordinator, at amy.perreault@ubc.ca.

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

Join us for the upcoming CTLT Institute! The CTLT Institute offers you an opportunity to share practice and research around teaching, learning, and technology with over 20 interactive workshops and panel discussions. The CTLT Institute is open to all faculty, staff, post-docs, and students in the UBC community.

This year, we will discuss the latest trends and development in education. Offering you an opportunity to gain practical strategies that can be implemented in your teaching and learning environment, we will focus on three areas:

• Pathways to Educational Leadership
• Techniques and Technologies in the Flexible ‘Classroom’
• Transformative Teaching and Learning

The CTLT Institute also provides an opportunity to network with presenters and colleagues, and further discuss the topics explored in the sessions. Here is a sneak peek at some of the sessions we will be hosting:

• Becoming a Professor of Teaching
• Open Courses and Open Pedagogies
• Metacognition: Teaching your Students to Learn
• Teaching, and Teaching with, Fears and Uncertainties

Full details will be posted to the CTLT website at the beginning of May. Stay tuned for more information about the 2013 CTLT Institute!

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

What’s New in the Teaching and Learning Resources Portal?

The Teaching and Learning Resources Portal on the UBC Wiki hosts a collection of resources and articles on a diverse range of teaching and learning topics, strategies, issues, and tools.

The following new bibliographies/resources have been recently added to the portal:

• Learning Patterns – Novices vs. Experts
• Aesthetics (Teaching and Learning)
• TAs and Blended Learning (Teaching and Learning)
• Transforming Student Learning Through Technology (Teaching and Learning)

You can submit a bibliography request around teaching and learning topics by filling out a request form.

For more information contact: Shaya Golparian, Ph.D., CTLT Resource Room Coordinator, at ctlt.resourceroom@exchange.ubc.ca.

iPeer Building Block – Integrating iPeer with Connect

Back in January, a new version of iPeer was released, and alongside it, an iPeer building block was developed to integrate iPeer with the Connect learning management system (Blackboard Learn). iPeer is an open source web application that allows instructors to develop and deliver rubric-based peer evaluations, review and release student comments, build progress report forms online, and analyze evaluation results. The iPeer building block allows users to create iPeer courses within Connect. Users can synchronize class lists, and push and pull groups to and from iPeer and Connect. It also allows the instructor to add an iPeer grade into the Connect Grade Center.

iPeer was originally developed in the UBC Faculty of Applied Science, and is currently being developed, hosted, and maintained by the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). Each term, approximately 70-80 UBC instructors use iPeer in their course. It is used by the Faculty of Applied Science, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education, Sauder School of Business, and UBC Okanagan. Since it is an open source application, others outside of UBC have been using it as well.

For more information about iPeer, email ipeer.support@ubc.ca or visit the Student Peer Review section of the e-learning website. You can learn more about the iPeer building block by visiting the documentation page, which was released in February.

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

If you would like to have your event listed in the next issue of Dialogues, please contact us at ctlt.newsletter@ubc.ca.

Copyright

Visit the Copyright website for a listing of upcoming copyright workshops. These sessions help faculty, staff, and students understand the appropriate use of copyrighted material at UBC.

Copyright Clinic Drop-in
April 4, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
April 11, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
April 18, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
April 25, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
May 2, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Register here

Members of the Copyright Advisory Group and others will be on hand to help you work through your copyright questions one-on-one. Bring your course lists, websites, or other work you need guidance on.

IOP 2013 – Online Registration

The 16th annual Investigating Our Practices (IOP) Conference will be happening May 11, 2013, in the Scarfe Building at UBC (2125 Main Mall). Co-sponsored by the Faculty of Education and the BC Teachers’ Federation, this event features 70 presentations by practicing teachers, graduate students, undergraduate students, and university educators from different educational contexts. Registration is $25 ($15 for students). Breakfast, refreshments, and lunch are included.

For more information or to register for the conference, visit the IOP Conference website or contact Judy Paley at 604-822-2733 or judy.paley@ubc.ca.

UBC Library

Citation Management Using RefWorks
April 3, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Register here

If you need to manage large numbers of references and citations as part of your research, teaching, or administrative work, citation management tools are for you. These tools provide a simple way to store, organize, and retrieve your citations in an effective manner, and can also help you in formatting in-text citations and bibliographies in your work. This hands-on workshop briefly introduces the main concepts of citation management and gives detailed instruction for using RefWorks, a popular citation management tool licensed by UBC Library.

Tips and Tricks for Formatting Your Thesis: Little Things Mean a Lot!
April 4, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
April 9, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Register here

Research Commons staff will help you with your questions about the nuts and bolts of thesis formatting: page layout, numbering, headings, front matter, and more! As well, find out more about the resources that are available to help you in writing your thesis/dissertation. Graduate students at any stage of the writing process are welcome; some prior knowledge of Microsoft Word will be helpful.

Citation Management Using Mendeley
April 4, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Register here

If you need to manage large numbers of references and citations as part of your research, teaching, or administrative work, citation management tools are for you. These tools provide a simple way to store, organize, and retrieve your citations in an effective manner, and can also help you in formatting in-text citations and bibliographies in your work. This hands-on workshop briefly introduces the main concepts of citation management and gives detailed instruction for installing and using Mendeley, one of the most popular citation management tools.

UBC Okanagan Learning Conference

UBC Okanagan will be holding its 9th Annual Learning Conference from May 1-2, 2013. The conference theme, Enhancing Student Learning, invites educators to share best practices and disseminate their research in sessions that will explore student learning, using inquiry in the undergraduate classroom, flexible learning environments, and optimum first year experiences. The conference will be held at the UBC Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC. Registration is free for all UBC Vancouver and Okanagan faculty and staff. There is a $100 registration fee for external faculty and registrants from other institutions. Register online on the conference website.

For more information, contact Heather Hurren (250-807-9288 or heather.hurren@ubc.ca).

ETUG Spring Workshop and T.E.L.L. Sessions

BC’s Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) is holding its upcoming Spring Workshop June 6-7, 2013. The theme for this year is “Tell it on the Mountain: Teaching, Engaging, Leading and Learning,” and the event will take place at the SFU Burnaby Mountain campus. To learn more about the ETUG Spring Workshop, visit the ETUG website.

ETUG also hosts monthly Lunch n’ Learn webinars on a variety of topics relating to teaching and learning with technology. The next session will take place on April 16, 2013, and it will focus on the construction of a professional conference poster. Registration is free and open to all. More information about this session can be found on the ETUG website.

STLHE 2013

Canada’s Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) will hold its 33rd annual conference at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia from June 19-22, 2013. The theme for 2013 is “Sustainability: Learning to Live, Learning for Life.”

More information can be found on the conference website.

Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student Advancement Conference: Teaching Graduate Students to Teach

Teaching Graduate Students to Teach is a two-day conference to promote best practices and scholarship among people who strive to do just that: cultivate the teaching abilities of graduate students across Canada. The conference will be held May 13-14, 2013, at the Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre location in Downtown Vancouver.

More information can be found on the conference website.

UBCevents

To see what else is happening on campus, be sure to visit the UBCevents online events calendar.

This article was published in the March 2013 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of the articles included in the issue:

Find out more information about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.

Check out the complete list of courses being offered for the May-August 2013 term in the online course guide.

Dr. Coll Thrush, an Associate Professor in the Department of History, began the session by offering a welcome in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the Musqueam language. Then Ms. Natalie Baloy, PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, explained what the operative word ‘affect’ had to do with the session. Affect, she said, refers to a range of reactions a person experiences in relation to actions, words, and experiences. Affect is basically an “academic way to say ‘emotion,’” Dr. Thrush said. Engaging with affect in the classroom is a critical mechanism in successfully being able to discuss issues such as Indigenous and settler histories, relations, and identities. Although the title and description of the workshop – ‘More Than Content’ – indicates that course content may evoke emotional responses beyond the purview of course material, Ms. Baloy and Dr. Thrush argued that affect is in fact a central dimension of learning about colonialism.

In her dissertation research, Ms. Baloy examines how non-Aboriginal people relate to Aboriginal people’s historical experiences and contemporary concerns in Vancouver. In interviews with participants, she attends not only to ‘content’ like treaty rights or material inequalities, but also to the emotional narratives people share: their memories, misgivings, expectations, and anxieties about their encounters with Aboriginal people. In the classroom, Ms. Baloy and Dr. Thrush explain, how instructors engage in these sorts of topics can radically shape a student’s learning experience.

One of the goals of the workshop was to explore the role of non-Aboriginal students in the classroom and their influence on affect. In the past, the general reaction to encounters with Aboriginal issues was “how do we ‘fix’ Aboriginal people,” said Dr. Thrush. But this is beginning to shift in a meaningful way towards the response of “how does the university change?” One of the tools that helped pioneer this paradigm transformation is the project What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom. It was developed in the UBC First Nations Studies Program, and expanded the reach of the conversation while producing “a lot of energy surrounding the topic,” explained Dr. Thrush. Affective student experiences have a huge impact on classroom climate, thus instructors need to be attentive to the affective dimensions of non-Aboriginal students.

Both Baloy and Thrush made it clear, as have other instructors and facilitators in the CTLT series, that the point of the workshop was not to be prescriptive. “Many people want to be told what they should do,” said Dr. Thrush, “but it is really about developing your own authenticities in your classroom. It’s about being real and honest, and sometimes crude and simplistic.” Dr. Thrush clarified that by ‘authenticities’ he didn’t mean cultural authenticity, but rather acting in a way that expresses personal values and brings an authentic voice to the classroom.

In order to develop tangible solutions for working productively with Aboriginal topics in a course, participants contributed to a list of “species” of affect that come out in the classroom and can create a precarious learning environment. Some of the suggested affective dimensions were denial, guilt, embarrassment—sometimes manifested from ignorance, and distance—, and the creation of an “us versus them” dichotomy. Evasiveness, or in its more active forms, resistance, cynicism, or resentment – what Dr. Thrush called “the colonial eye roll” – were some of the other ideas offered. Student’s indifference presents a particularly challenging affective response. Although vastly different in some ways, all of the mentioned forms of affect also have many similarities. None of them are tightly bound in expression, meaning that they can all blend into each other in some way. They “all individually or collectively lead to [emotional] paralysis,” said Dr. Thrush. The forms of affect are also all partially the result of students feeling ambiguously positioned within conversations.

Ms. Baloy explained that, while planning the workshop, she and Dr. Thrush began developing their own list of “species” of affect. They were surprised by the number and range of different emotions they had witnessed in their classrooms. The exercise of collectively listing these myriad affective dimensions demonstrates the importance of recognizing the influence of affective experience on classroom climate, and learning how to address the causes and effects of these emotions.

Using this knowledge, each group of participants were given a combination of emotions and were asked to share their experiences around them. Within their small groups, participants dug deeper into their assigned set of emotional responses. Many discussed their personal teaching experiences pertaining to Aboriginal issues in the classroom, and how a teaching situation elicited the feelings they were discussing. The goal of the group work was to brainstorm concrete strategies that could be used to mitigate or handle these encounters in the future. It is often difficult for students to find a place to position themselves within the Indigenous narrative, but one participant suggested a way to discuss Aboriginal topics with emotions and opinions being “expressed without being personalized.” Dr. Thrush and Ms. Baloy suggest frontloading courses with a disclaimer. Pointing to a whiteboard that displayed all of the suggested forms of affect, Dr. Thrush said “I tell them, ‘any of you may feel x, y, or z, and that is what this class is partially about.’ Some of them self-censor and drop the course, but the ones who stay, those are the ones you want to work with. It’s not that students are expected to feel these emotions, but it’s always a possibility that they will.”

Another technique Dr. Thrush likes to use is to take a moment of silence during his class and let everyone “feel what they feel, and ask the question ‘how did we get here?’” Transparency is also another key. Dr. Thrush suggested that “it is important to acknowledge what is going on. It doesn’t do anyone any good to ignore that it’s there…Guilt, even, is very egocentric. [The response to it] is ‘I feel so bad,’ and then it becomes about that person. What it comes down to is finding a balance between acknowledging its presence and not making it all about you.” Figuring out how to do that can be a challenge.

While sharing experiences and strategies as a large group, participants debated the concept of the classroom as a “safe space.” Part of the work involved in addressing affect in the classroom may involve discomfort. Ms. Baloy asked, “when we create ‘safe spaces,’ we may ask: safe for whom?” She explained that attending to affect in the classroom may involve discomfort, especially for students who are accustomed to comfort and privilege. Participants shared their own reflections about feeling “safe” versus uncomfortable in classroom discussions, and considered ways to facilitate open and honest discussion while also challenging non-Aboriginal students to communicate respectfully when outside of their comfort zones.

Concluding on a more positive note, everyone was reminded that there are also positive experiences of affect. Transformation, enlightenment, and empowerment were some of the emotions on the other side of the spectrum. Dr. Thrush ended by referencing Thomas King’s The Truth of Stories, in which King points out that we can never deny that we have heard a story: “You can do what you want with the information you just received, but you cannot tell me that you didn’t hear it.” He added that sometimes it takes students years to digest and make sense of the discussions on Aboriginal topics that they have in the classroom. His own teaching experience has lent to that assertion. However, the hope is that after participating in this workshop, participants will have a better grasp of how emotions come alive in the classroom, the implications that they may have, and the ways in which they can be integrated into learning and understanding.