Category Archives: Teaching

Professional development as an Instructor

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Presented in reappointment professional dossier, August 2022.

Professional Development prior to UBC – 1999 to 2016

I formally began teaching SW in 2006 at a college (CEGEP) in Montreal. Over nine years, I taught eight courses, developed new curriculum materials, and learned from more experienced teaching colleagues. During this time, I also completed professional development courses, including:

  • A year-long training program for new instructors;
  • Teaching and Learning Workshops;
  • Participation in a Community of Practice on applications of UDL; and
  • Directed studies from a recognized University Education program.

I also worked with education experts to collaboratively design cutting-edge pedagogy and tools such as new evaluation rubrics, collaborative classroom technologies and project-based teaching. One of the signature research projects on which I collaborated was to develop UDL as a teaching tool. My time teaching and learning at CEGEP helped me develop and strengthen my foundation as an educator.

 

Continuous Learning at UBC – 2019 to Present

Since joining UBC, I have attended several workshops, conferences and programs to enhance my teaching and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). They include:

  • CTLT Workshops: Course Design Intensive, 2019; Instructional Skills Workshop, 2019; Sharing Ideas, Tips, and Strategies for Preparing EL CVs and Dossiers, 2019; Education for Connection and Purpose, 2019; Celebrate SoTL, 2019; Classroom Evaluation and Research: Do I Need Ethics Approval, 2022;
  • CASWE-ACFTS 2019 and 2021 Conferences;
  • Universal Design for Learning, Pan Canadian Conference at Royal Roads University, 2019;
  • Mount Royal University’s Teaching and Learning Conference, 2021;
  • International Association of Social Work with Groups Symposium, 2021.

I have participated in several programs and groups for continuous professional development, including:

  • SoTL Seed Program: I have worked with the Institute of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISoTL) Seed Program since 2020. I am currently working on my second SoTL Seed Project, which provides a research expert, and connection with specialists at the (ISoTL) UBC and meetings to discuss completing a SoTL project with other faculty;
  • ISoTL Scholar Member: In 2022 Winter, I joined the ISoTL as a Scholar member. “The ISoTL Membership program was established in 2021 to create a formal group of experts to strengthen SoTL at UBC. Members will work together with the ISoTL leadership team to strengthen the UBC community of SoTL practitioners, engage in independent and collaborative SoTL within and beyond the classroom, and support each other in scholarly dissemination” (ISoTL, UBC, Website). Members discuss SoTL and participate in organizing events (E.g. Celebrate SoTL) on a monthly basis;
  • Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL): Since Fall 2019, I have collaborated with the CCEL at UBC to explore opportunities for community-engaged learning with advisors, at events, and by connecting with other professors;
  • UBC Educational Leadership Network Mentoring Program: In the summer of 2021, I was offered the opportunity to be mentored by Sally Stewart, Associate Professor of Teaching at the UBC-O School of Health and Exercise Sciences. This mentorship has provided me with essential guidance in understanding my work as an Assistant Professor of Teaching, the tenure process, and navigating the different facets of academia.

Engaging Students to Improve Course Design

Throughout my teaching career, both prior to, and at UBC, students have been a key component of my foundation as an educator, as I believe I have as much to learn from them as they do from me. In class, I take the time to observe student interactions and learn who they are, which helped me to adapt my teaching strategies and styles to match their learning styles. I also seek feedback about courses and discuss the learning experience with them. Doing so creates stronger connections between students, the classroom experience and I. When students see how their voices can influence a course, it further motivates them to engage in the course and enhances their learning experience (Wickramasinghe & Timpson, 2006).

Here are some examples of my strategies for engaging with students:

  • SOWK201: Students complete a survey (Qualtrics) before the first class to learn more about their experiences, motivations and learning styles;
  • SOWK440C/529A: At mid-term, I ask students to discuss the course, what is working, what is not working, and identify recommendations in my absence. Afterwards, I return to discuss their findings with them, and adapt the course with the agreed-upon recommendations;
  • SOWK335: We conducted focus groups on the primary pedagogy of the course (Community of Practice Pedagogy). This allowed students to share their experiences in-depth and gave me valuable information on how to continue improving the pedagogy;
  • Student Experience of Instruction (SEI): I encourage students to participate in SEI surveys and share their experiences and their ideas to improve the course. Then I read their evaluations and ideas, identifying priorities to improve the course and integrating these the following year. At the beginning of the semester, I present to students the main changes I’ve made to the course inspired by ideas shared by students. By doing so, I demonstrate how engaging in SEI and sharing their ideas can contribute to meaningful change.

Courses taught at UBC

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Presented in reappointment professional dossier, August 2022.

An essential aspect of my teaching is to create unique and engaging experiences for my students in each of my courses. I do so by tailoring the teaching pedagogies to the theories and topics of each course. When students can see the coherence between teaching methods and the content, it leads to a more engaging and inspiring learning experience. Since I may be students’ instructor multiple times over, I can encourage student interest, participation and learning by making their learning experience unique and inspiring within each course.

In the following section, I briefly describe the six courses I have taught at UBC. I illustrate how the five key elements of my teaching philosophy – understanding student diversity, promoting accessibility and inclusion, student-centred pedagogies, relevant subjects, and opportunities for practice – underlie the course design.

 

SOWK201: Introduction to Social Work – 3 credits, 12 sessions, 36 hours

Winter 2019, 53 students and Winter 2020, 49 students – 1 TA

Description – This course introduces the knowledge, values, skills, practices, and ethics of social work, as well as perspectives for understanding the context of individual and social problems. A key component of the course is to help students develop a better understanding of the social and environmental factors that have contributed to their personal development, which is key to developing a professional identity.

Students, Accessibility and Inclusion – Prior to the first session, I surveyed students to learn about the diversity and experiences as a learner (e.g. how do you think you learn best?). This provided me with valuable insight on course design and integrating appropriate student-centred pedagogies. I use UDL principles and techniques into the preparation of the course to enhance learning accessibility for diverse learners (see udlguidelines.cast.org). For example, to help students access knowledge, I employ multiple methods such as lectures, videos, readings, and podcasts to convey content. In addition, my pedagogy was guided by Kolb’s experiential learning model, in which we engage in different learning methods: observation, reflection, conceptualization and experimentation. This also supports diverse learning strategies and offers students a more holistic approach to learning.  I use Critical Pedagogy to promote inclusion in the classroom experience by discussing safety, classroom power dynamics, and ways of creating a Brave Space.

 

SOWK315/316: Integrative Seminar and Practicum – 6 credits, 12 sessions, 36 hours

Fall 2019 to Winter 2020, 16 students

Description – In SOWK315, students learn the core elements of social work, focusing on macro social work practice and social justice. Students also undertake a practicum in a community organization where they contribute to its priorities and work on complex, community-based challenges. SOWK316 is a seminar designed to integrate learnings from field, practice, and theory courses to further students’ professional development. The seminar pushes students to reflect critically on their practicum experience, monitor their practice development and make connections among the ethical, theoretical and skill elements of social work practice.

Pedagogy and Course Design – These courses are conducted through classroom and group discussions during which students engage in critical dialogue with one another on practicum and classroom experiences. I have introduced different aspects of critical pedagogy in this seminar, such as dialogical exercises, exploring the relationship between theory and practice, and building autonomy as SW students.

 

SOWK335: Social Analysis for Social Work Practice – 3 credits, 12 sessions, 36 hours

Winter 2019, 51 students, Winter 2020, 50 students and Winter 2021, 55 students – 1 TA

Description – This course provides students with an understanding of foundational concepts and ways racism, capitalism, settler colonialism, globalization, and patriarchy intersect to produce social locations, violence, oppression and political resistance. By working with various theories, methods and case scenarios, students become familiar with essential political, social and ideological factors that influence personal and social problems and structural oppressions. This course teaches students how to conduct an informed and critical social analysis of the key personal and social factors within structural contexts. As a result, students develop a progressive theoretical and practice framework within which to approach work with individuals, families, and groups.

Pedagogy and Course Design – Analysis is an essential part of SW practice which often occurs through dialogue with service-users or within teams exploring complex situations. I redesigned the course by integrating the Community of Practice (CoP) learning strategy and dialogical approach to give students the opportunity to practice and mirror this analytical practice in class. Through a CoP structure, students engage in dialogical analysis of complex situations of oppression and discrimination. This approach helps students to engage in collaborative learning while building their own autonomy to undertake situational, locational and structural analyses.

 

SOWK415/416: Advanced Integrative Seminar in Social Work Theory, Policy and Practice – 6 credits, 6 sessions, 18 hours

Winter 2021, 20 students and Winter 2022, 18 students

Description – This seminar is designed to continue helping students integrate learning from field, practice, and theory courses to further their professional development by building on their third-year practice courses. It provides students with a further opportunity to critically reflect upon their practicum experience, monitor their practice development, continue to develop practice skills within the context of social work values and ethics, and make connections between thinking, feeling and doing in the context of being a social worker.

Course Design, Pedagogy, and Relevant Subjects – In 2022, we transformed SOWK416 from a six to a 10-session seminar. The extended course provided students with a better opportunity to identify, analyze, and address complex ethical dilemmas inspired by their experiences in their placements. Two sessions are devoted to how to process ethical dilemmas with ethical frameworks and SW theories. Students are given opportunities to practice and demonstrate learning by  presenting ethical dilemmas and leading peer dialogues exploring possible resolutions of these complex situations.

 

SOWK440C/529A: Communities, Social Development and Community Organizing: Frameworks and Strategies for Practice – 11 to 12 sessions, 33 to 36 hours

Fall 2019, 9 students, Fall 2020, 21 students and Summer 2022, 21 students

Description – This course critically explores community organizing and social development as components of a broader set of critical social praxis and processes.  Students and I work together to create knowledge and skills in activism, social development, social change needed by Community Organizers to address oppression and build healthy communities. Students engage in a Project-Based Learning Pedagogy, developing projects with a Community Organizing lens. Classroom sessions focus on exploring different frameworks, methods, SW tools and applications in different contexts. Through projects, students apply theory directly, build knowledge from experience, and gain real-world experience.

Pedagogy and Opportunities to Practice – This course’s main inspiration is Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, which deconstructs the ‘banking’ concept of teaching and learning in order to reconstruct together a learning environment that acknowledges freedom, power and the democratic possibility of learning. It uses experiential, community-based learning by integrating elements from process-based learning pedagogy. Throughout the semester, students work collaboratively in teams, and plan and complete a community organizing project as their primary assignment. The primary assignment is also the main pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy.

 

SOWK550: Co-teaching Social Work and Social Justice – 3 credits, 12 sessions, 36 hours

Fall 2020, 37 students

Description – This graduate-level course is designed to help students locate themselves within the constructs of social justice and develop a comprehensive practice framework consistent with Social Work theories, values and ethics.

Pedagogy and Relevant Subjects – I co-delivered this course online in the context of the COVID pandemic. We reviewed the topics, content and readings, and redesigned most aspects of the learning strategy and assignments. We used elements of Critical Pedagogy, which were limited by the online environment (Collaborate Ultra). We invited inspiring guest speakers into the course. To promote student engagement and participation, we used CoP Pedagogy, where students engaged every week in small group discussions to explore topics in-depth and collaborate on final group assignments.

Philosophy of teaching

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Presented in reappointment professional dossier, August 2022.

Each of us has a unique experience of what it means to be a student. During my youth, my family moved to three different countries with three native languages. As a result, I changed schools nine times before University. For me, school was about constant adaptation and catching up. I often felt I did not fit in and lost the motivation to learn through these challenging and frequent transitions. However, it was when I enrolled in a School of Social Work that I began to understand the significance of learning. My teachers helped me recognize that learning was not about grades, approvals or meeting social expectations. Instead, learning was about understanding how the world functioned, what my role could be, and how I could contribute as a Social Worker (SW). This provided me with a natural motivation, curiosity, and desire to learn. As I enter the classroom as a teacher, I am always looking for this genuine curiosity in students and trying to bring it into our learning experience.

The learning process is complex and can be reflected by three fundamental principles: Engagement, Representation and Action (Novak, 2019). First, individuals must be engaged and motivated to learn. Once engaged, they need access to knowledge and materials to be learned and developed. Finally, learning is only complete when demonstrated; learners need opportunities to practice, express, and show their learning and apply it to real-world situations to better the individual, community, and society. My teaching philosophy enacts these three principles through a course design that integrates five key elements: an understanding of students’ diversity; design promoting accessibility and inclusion; student-centred pedagogies; relevant subject and topics; thoughtful inclusion of opportunities to practice and demonstrate learning.


Understanding Student Diversity, Promoting Accessibility and Inclusion

The first step to building engagement in learning is to understand the diversity and uniqueness of students, their learning strategies, needs and barriers (Fry and Marshall, 2003). Higher Education can be a complex environment for people with disabilities, equity-deserving groups, people in poverty and anyone who did not grow up in a family with a higher education background (Strange and Cox, 2016). These populations experience a disproportionate number of barriers to learning which impact their ability to engage and succeed. I build student engagement and participation in learning by decreasing obstacles that students experience and increasing the accessibility of my courses. To promote equity and inclusion, I continually reflect on my teaching practice, as “[a]nti-oppressive teaching happens only when we are trying to address the partial nature of our own teaching” (Kumashiro, 2004). I also invite students to critically reflect on their own classroom experience, relationships with colleagues, the subjects being taught and their own learning experiences. When discussing safety in the classroom, I acknowledge the risks and challenges of engaging in a learning community and work collaboratively with students to increase safety and create a brave space (Simon and Al., 2022). Adopting accessible learning tools and identifying teaching strategies that can effectively stimulate students’ interests helps them sustain and self-regulate their engagement with the learning process.

 

Student-Centred Pedagogies

My teaching pedagogies focus on student-centred (Hoidn and Klemenčič, 2020), critical (Freire, 1998) and experiential learning (Kolb, 2005). They de-emphasize teachers as experts and re-centre students as active participants in a Community of Learners. Learning together changes the paradigm of teaching by an expert and makes students become responsible for their learning and making sense of knowledge. As Freire reminds us, “to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge” (1998). My role as an Educator is to provide a supportive and conducive student-centred learning environment that encourages critical thinking, shared power, dialogue, and action, in which students can work individually and collectively to assimilate, analyze, and turn information into knowledge. In doing so, we prepare SW students to deepen their ability to understand the complexity of SW, use theory to engage meaningfully in their practice and become critical thinkers.

 

Relevant Subjects

For teaching and learning to be meaningful, they need to be connected with realness and history. When we learn about how the world functions, we can participate in it and change it for the better. The classroom becomes a space where we can be part of history as it is being written (Freire, 1998). SW is a continually evolving field, and I renew my understanding by positioning myself as a learner with my students when exploring topics in SW. We co-create knowledge, and create, re-create and adapt our understanding of SW.

 

Opportunities for Practice

Assessments play an essential part in students’ learning, as they “define[s] what students regard as important, how they spend their time and how they come to see themselves as students and then as graduates” (Brown and Pendlebury, 2013). To help students prepare to embrace the complexity of SW practices, I create assignments that simulate “real life” by using self-reflective, active and problem-based approaches that promote deeper learning where students can demonstrate their abilities to understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create (Bloom’s taxonomy, see Krathwohl, 2002). In this way, learners demonstrate their learning by using it in real-world situations. Doing this allows students to be engaged, knowing that they are becoming SW and contributing to solving real-world problems through their assignments.

 

Course Design

Robust course design is a way for me to embrace the complexity of teaching and ensure that the principles and key elements are implemented within the courses I teach. Through course preparation, I select the appropriate learning objectives, content, pedagogy and assessments to enhance the student learning experience (Fry and Marshall, 2003). My preparation acknowledges that what we learn is equally as important as why and how we learn. I encourage student engagement in learning by connecting the classroom and the community of learners with relevant, real-world problems, and providing the opportunity to demonstrate and apply knowledge to problem-solving. Good course design simplifies learning by helping students understand the course, navigate the semester-long learning narrative, and become more independent in their learning journey. A healthy course design ensures that these essential principles and key elements of learning are present in my work so that I may focus on the teaching and the learning experience.

Looking back at my personal experience, my SW teachers helped me heal as a learner and become a complete person who found his place as a SW in the world. I understand from this experience that teaching is “about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life. It is about finding and claiming ourselves and our place in the world” (Palmer, 2012). My journey as an educator is now dedicated to creating a space where students can engage in their journey to becoming whole and, together, find meaning in being a SW in this world. Each time I enter the classroom, I am reminded of the privilege I have of being an educator.

  • Brown, G. A., Bull, J., & Pendlebury, M. (2013). Assessing student learning in higher education. Taylor and Francis: city.
  • Freire, Paolo, (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
  • Fry, H., Ketteridge, S., & Marshall, S. 2003. A handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: Enhancing academic practice (2nd ed.). Kogan Page.
  • Hoidn, S., & Klemenčič, M. (2020). The Routledge international handbook of student-centered learning and teaching in higher education. Taylor and Francis.
  • Kolb, A. Y., & Kolb, D. A. (2005). Learning styles and learning spaces: Enhancing experiential learning in higher education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4, 193–212.
  • Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218.
  • Kumashiro, K. K., Taylor & Francis. (2004). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. Routledge Falmer.
  • Palmer, P. J., (2012). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life (10th anniversary ed.). Jossey-Bass.
  • Simon, J. D., Boyd, R., & Subica, A. M. (2022;2021). Refocusing intersectionality in social work education: Creating a brave space to discuss oppression and privilege. Journal of Social Work Education, 58(1), 34-45.
  • Strange C. C., Cox D. H.(Eds.) (2016). Serving diverse students in canadian higher education. McGill-Queen’s University Press.