News

Anne Marie Ryan, University Teaching Fellow

DATES: June 15-July 3 2020

Synchronous meetings tentatively: June 15, 18, 22, 25, and 29 (1 hour: suggested 9:30-10:30), or as works for the group – contact Anne Marie Ryan if this time is a problem amryan@dal.ca.

Course Description

This course is offered as a mix of synchronous and asynchronous online learning. Participants must have access to a computer and be able to actively participate in a minimum of 4 of the 5 synchronous sessions of approximately 1 hour. Participants can expect to spend 3-4 hours a week in addition, and then complete a project of relevance to their own context.

Much of our teaching traditionally focusses on content, the knowledge and skills we deem important within our discipline. This content is embedded in a context that we often leave untapped, so the richness of our disciplines can fail to be meaningfully exposed. What is this context beyond the content? In terms of our teaching, this might include such aspects as the relevance of the discipline to society, globally and locally, and the impact of society on our discipline; helping students unpack their own learning so they learn more deeply (metacognition); exploring the issues that have ethical implications and helping them develop decision-making tools; information literacy in all its guises; and what are often referred to as the “4Cs” of 21^st Century learning, critical thinking, communication, creativity, and collaboration. While we may be engaging students in many of these perspectives, we can also fail to be explicit around this broader context of our disciplines, so students fail to make the connections or see the relevance.

Integrating active learning where reasonable throughout these online sessions, this studio course explores a number of these and other aspects of context beyond content, and how, through being more deliberate in our teaching, we can enrich the learning opportunities for our students without compromising the content. Participants can expect to have some reading to do before and between sessions, contribute to the online discussion board and group interaction, and to complete a project in which they integrate the ideas from the course into a framework for one of their own courses.

Please note: This Studio Course has limited enrolment. If you have already taken two studio courses, please do not enrol at this time. If you are interested in this course and would like to attend it another time, please email betsy.keating@dal.ca to be added to a waitlist for the next offering of Beyond Content. 

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