Thompson-Okanagan Teaching and Learning Conference
Scholarship and Practice, May 9th-10th, 2024
UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, BC
UBC Okanagan in collaboration with Thompson Rivers University is hosting their inaugural Thompson-Okanagan Teaching and Learning Conference.
About the Conference
The conference theme of Scholarship and Practice invites all educators to share their stories. Presenters are encouraged to demonstrate or discuss all facets of their research and practice in a variety of different modes. This conference will be entirely in-person.
A keynote and a panel discussion will be livestreamed as part of UBC’s Celebrate Learning Week.
Individuals are given 5 minutes to present a topic regarding their research or practice. This would be an excellent venue to tell us about:
- A work in progress
- New teaching tools
- Course development
- Potential areas of collaboration
Lighting talks will be followed up with a 5-minute question period.
Individuals or groups are invited to disseminate a 15-minute presentation, followed by 5 minutes of questions. This venue is appropriate for larger demonstrations of scholarship and more lengthy stories of practice.
Workshops will be scheduled for 60 minutes and are expected to have interactive components. This is a great opportunity for educators to share hands-on experience with their scholarship or practice.
The poster session is the perfect opportunity to display and communicate your work to a broad audience. This session will run concurrently with an evening reception.
Keynote Speaker: Jessica Riddell
Dr. Jessica Riddell is a Full Professor of Early Modern Literature in the English Department at Bishop’s University (Quebec, Canada). She holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence at Bishop’s University; in this capacity, she leads conversations about systems-change in higher education that shifts the focus from resilience to human flourishing. In her research, teaching, leadership, and administration, she participates in a wide range of interchanges at the national and international levels about how universities fulfil the social contract to a broader society.
Title: Hope Circuits: Re-membering and renewal for human flourishing
We now find ourselves at the precipice of a higher-education paradigm shift. After many years of incremental change and deferral, we need substantial change. What we do now will inform how we, as individuals, institutions, and society, experience revolutionary change. It is an extraordinary time that challenges us to go back to the fundamentals and ask:
What is higher education?
What is the social contract we have with a broader society?
And, how can we fulfill this mandate at the systems- and sector-wide levels?
What the new paradigm looks like is not yet clear. We are in the early stages of emergence that will only come into focus in retrospect. Nevertheless, when we have adequate tools, mindset, and purpose to design better systems we can carve out agency to determine what this new paradigm looks like. To do so, we must be willing to surface the rot, stay with the trouble, and build our capacities for daring imagination: this is what a commitment to systemic flourishing looks like.
We are overdue for a new model: what shape will it take?