Three Questions about Teaching and Learning (3QTL‪)‬ Derritt Mason

We might not instinctively associate drag queens with teacher education, but for Dr. Harper Keenan, the queer imagination has tremendous potential to help us “unscript curriculum” and think about our classrooms in radically different ways. The Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender and Sexuality Research in Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Dr. Keenan has initiated an impressive array of community collaborations, including Drag Story Hour and the Trans Freedom School. Join us as Dr. Keenan describes the challenges (and unexpected rewards) of teaching pre-service teachers during pandemic lockdowns; the transformative power of queer, trans, and drag pedagogy; and why it feels more important than ever to celebrate queer creativity and worldmaking. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

For Dr. Bryan Dewsbury, equity-minded, inclusive, or humanist teaching means distinguishing teaching students from teaching subject matter. The humanity of students, in other words, is prioritized over course content, and their lived experiences become vital to how the classroom operates. In our conversation, Dr. Dewsbury describes how he confronted the challenges of teaching online during COVID lockdowns, while also highlighting the many dimensions of his approach to humanist teaching. He explains, for example, how restructuring “office hours” as “student hours” can deepen student learning; how the principles of PhD qualifying exams might help us design open-book undergraduate exams; and he offers other possibilities for inviting students to become thoughtful, engaged citizens. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

In a 3QTL first, we are delighted to feature two guests on today’s episode: Dr. Patrina Duhaney and Dr. Regine King, the award-winning co-developers and instructors of a University of Calgary course entitled “Afrocentric Perspectives in Social Work.” As members of their Faculty’s Anti-Black Racism Task Force, which was established in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, Dr. King and Dr. Duhaney were motivated to create a course that would familiarize students with the challenges and barriers experienced by Black people in a Canadian context. Our guests also found themselves in the difficult situation of having to launch and team-teach this course during pandemic lockdowns. Join us as Dr. Duhaney and Dr. King describe the social justice principles at the foundation of their approach to team teaching, their creative and collaborative assignment design, and their strategies for communicating—with each other and with their students—in a new and challenging teaching and learning scenario. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

The most challenging years of COVID lockdowns found Dr. Morgan Vanek inhabiting the role of student more often than she might have expected. As she learned to parent, drive, and cook—all during a pandemic—Dr. Vanek found herself reflecting deeply on those core values that were guiding her teaching and learning practice, while simultaneously rediscovering the value of the Humanities for helping us survive and make sense of global crises. Join us as Dr. Vanek outlines the many ways she transformed her classrooms in light of these experiences: from the implementation of “ungrading” techniques like contract and labour-based grading, to strategies for demystifying the “hidden architecture” of university courses, to centering social justice in a course focused on the traditional canon of English literature. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

We rarely imagine the library to be a “rowdy” space, but for Jessie Loyer, unruliness and quiet contemplation can (and should!) coexist in our libraries. Drawing from her research on Indigenous information literacy and the Cree legal concept of “wâhkôhtowin”—the imperative to know your relatives—Jessie invites us to rethink what it means to “visit” a library, both ethically and relationally. How, as instructors, are we in a reciprocal relationship with not only our students, but also with the knowledge we acquire through research and those spaces in which we conduct it? How did the sudden shift to online teaching and learning transform our abilities to “visit”? And how might centering reciprocity in our classroom practices also surface the importance of care, compassion, and—perhaps most importantly—a pedagogy of cute cats? Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.

Justice, believing students, and believing in students: according to Dr. Cate Denial, these are the three pillars of “a pedagogy of kindness,” an approach to teaching and learning that centers care for ourselves, as instructors, and care for our students. Dr. Denial, the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Illinois, is also the Primary Investigator of “Care in the Academy,” a Mellon Foundation-funded project examining pedagogies, communities, and practices of care in the academy after COVID-19. Kindness, Dr. Denial stresses, must include reconciliation, forgiveness, and accountability, and it should be distinguished from “niceness.” Join us as Dr. Denial generously details what a pedagogy of kindness might look like in practice, from paying careful attention to the language of our syllabi, to reconsidering our assessment practices, to providing students with fidget toys in online classes. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.