Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal
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Examining the Design, Development, and Partnership in the Creation of an Online, Asynchronous, Dual-Enrollment Microeconomics Course
Get PDFWhen higher education was forced to transition to virtual instruction during the early months of COVID, Auburn University’s Department of Economics continued instruction through both synchronous and asynchronous lectures. During that same time, the Auburn First Dual Enrollment Initiative was gradually increasing its course offerings for interested Alabama high school students. As the Auburn First program recognized the demand for an online microeconomics course, the Department of Economics recognized the importance of delivering quality online instruction. The authors of this article came together through the partnership of these two departments in August 2020. Tasked with enhancing the quality of the online microeconomics course for the Auburn First Initiative, the economics instructor and the instructional designer spent the remainder of 2020 collaborating virtually—both synchronously and asynchronously—to design and develop an interactive, media-rich course to meet the needs of dual enrollment microeconomics students in the 2021 spring semester. In this article, the instructor and instructional designer reflect on their experiences, challenges, and solutions in the course design, development, and implementation of the online, asynchronous, dual-enrollment microeconomics course. The paper also includes recommendations for faculty and instructional designers for developing more effective collaborative relationships
Enhancing Online Certificate Programs: A Reflection on Aquaculture Course Development
Get PDFThe rapidly growing field of aquaculture demands a skilled workforce equipped with up-to-date knowledge and practical skills. Online certification programs have emerged as an accessible and efficient way to address this need. This reflective essay aimed at exploring the development of a series of courses for an online aquaculture certification program through reflective methodology. The significance of this endeavor lies in its potential to transform aquaculture education by blending theoretical insights with practical applications, making it more engaging and effective
Decoding Spatial Empathy: Using Digital Storytelling to Overcome Barriers in Geographic Understanding
No full textThis study applies the Decoding the Disciplines framework to address a persistent bottleneck in geographic education: students\u27 difficulty developing spatial empathy in increasingly hybridized learning environments. Spatial empathy—the ability to deeply connect with and understand places and their inhabitants beyond cognitive recognition—requires students to overcome ontological and epistemological barriers rooted in colonial perspectives of space. Through careful analysis, we identify expert mental moves that geographers employ, including multi-sensory engagement with place, recognition of temporal layers and multiple narratives, embodied spatial cognition, connecting personal experience to broader contexts, and transferring spatial understanding across physical and digital realms. We created immersive 3D audio experiences featuring pandemic-related campus narratives and measured their impact on 47 university students. Results demonstrate significant differences in emotional responses between students who experienced campus closure (more negative emotional tone, higher intensity) versus those who didn\u27t, though both groups reported high empathy levels. Qualitative data revealed three key themes: perspective-taking, accessibility awareness, and sensory connection to place. Digital storytelling effectively modeled expert mental moves by making tacit knowledge visible and fostering embodied engagement through sonic pedagogies. This approach offers geography educators a framework for teaching place-based concepts in hybrid contexts while challenging visual dominance in spatial representation. Our findings extend the Decoding paradigm to encompass multi-sensory dimensions of spatial understanding, demonstrating how immersive soundscapes can bridge disconnections from place while fostering mutual understanding across diverse experiences
Writing as a Critical, Cultural, and Emotional Terrain
No full textThis article examines the cognitive and emotional bottlenecks that students encounter in intensive writing courses, highlighting how these challenges emerge across diverse student populations. Drawing on classroom practice, student narratives, and writing studies scholarship, I argue that writing difficulties should be reframed not as failures but as moments of intellectual and emotional friction where learning is most possible. Two major bottlenecks, confusing information delivery with argumentation and internalized emotional blocks such as self-doubt, linguistic insecurity, and academic trauma, are explored in depth. These are further broken into sub-bottlenecks of observation, imagination, skill development, and revision, each scaffolded to help students move from passive summarizers to confident arguers. Strategies such as emotional decoding, multimodal composition, and reflective revision are presented as tools to cultivate voice, agency, and rhetorical flexibility. By integrating theoretical framing with practical classroom interventions, this model resists deficit framings and affirms diverse literacies. Ultimately, bottlenecks, once decoded, become gateways, not only to stronger academic writing but also to greater intellectual agency and self-efficacy across disciplines
(Un)learning with Absence: A Dialogue with Critical Feminist Educators in Scandinavia
Get PDFFeminist pedagogy in higher education is concerned with making visible the sites of women’s oppression and marginalization in the classroom. Yet this consciousness raising is not met with a pre-defined set of pedagogical tools. Instead, educators often find themselves having to work with absence. Committing to a pedagogy that teaches and works with what is absent raises a whole set of dilemmas and questions for gender studies educators. In this annotated dialogue, a group of five graduate students and teaching-research faculty come together to discuss the implications of this commitment. We discuss collectively which conversations and issues we see as not well represented in teaching materials to our pedagogical advantage. An absence framework presents a fascinating opportunity to interrupt the very notion of ‘learning’ and what it entails. As we are all interested in questions of teaching and unlearning as a kind of transformative practice, we also ask how we can make visible other perspectives and genuinely integrate them without relying on a ‘one-time’ performance model that tokenizes marginalized identities
Overcoming Barriers to Actionable Change: Building Collaboration between Educational Development and Assessment
Get PDFThis article emphasizes the need for a stronger alliance between educational development and academic assessment in higher education, building on Kinzie et al.’s 2019 insights into their shared goals. It focuses on identifying and overcoming barriers to effective collaboration, aiming to enhance student learning. The barriers are classified into three types: structural, arising from organizational history and setup; agency, rooted in institutional policies affecting faculty engagement; and political, linked to internal power dynamics and cultural norms. A comprehensive framework to tackle these barriers is outlined, highlighting the need for effective communication, shared goals, mutual respect, and continuous improvement. The study proposes strategies to forge these conditions that include restructuring for enhanced collaboration, policy reform advocacy, development of faculty support programs, and fostering a culture of collaboration through shared governance. Emphasizing reflective practice, the study advocates for a transformative approach in educational institutions, establishing strong communication channels, and creating shared training and dialogue platforms. By implementing framework strategies to identify and de-energize barriers to collaboration, the study suggests that connecting educational development and assessment can evolve higher education into a more cohesive, innovative, and student-focused system, realizing its full potential
A Transformative Dialogue with ChatGPT
Get PDFThis article provides an overview and introduction to ChatGPT that can be used in higher education settings to help professors and students explore the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) while acquainting themselves with the popular ChatGPT interface. The article offers a demonstration of ChatGPT, including prompts to generate substantive exchanges and questions that introduce users to the technology while also allowing the technology to introduce itself to users. Several applications and examples that illustrate the potential for ChatGPT to enhance classroom dialogues are highlighted
The Ceremony of a SoTL Welcome: The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a Case Study
Get PDFTwo scholars explore the forms of welcome and moments of invitation experienced both as scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) scholars and as longtime members of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Their experiences of welcome into SoTL work represent invitations for mutual inquiry, sustained encouragement, and finding continuity in fostering the same for others, through ISSOTL conferences and through published work. The goal in this article is to present our insights into the ceremony of welcome in ISSOTL as a case study for other transdisciplinary intellectual societies and spaces, in order that they may reflect intentionally on the ways in which they do, and do not yet, fully welcome scholars into their academic community
Building Transdisciplinary SoTL: Creating a Culture and Language of Listening and Learning for Understanding
Get PDFThis paper explores a range of metaphors and methods (Shulman, 2012) that have impacted the development of SoTL across the disciplines at our university. Given that faculty are spread across approximately 60 disciplines and four Colleges at UCC, it is important to figure out how we can communicate effectively about how we teach and how our students learn. A number of research questions are central to the paper: How can faculty talk about teaching and learning effectively across the disciplines if the latter work primarily in specific ways? How can we find an overarching language that facilitates transdisciplinary dialogue, communication and critique? Some of Shulman’s questions are also central regarding the nature of the discourse on teaching and learning, how it has changed and how it challenges the discipline.
SoTL does not develop accidentally, overnight. We have trod a SoTL pathway for over 20 years and can identify certain methods and metaphors that have led the way. The latter provide historical and cultural clues that beget a scholarly approach. SoTL itself provides methods that are at once processes of documentation and investigation, found in its portfolio genres, for example. The paper will explore these research methods, as well as the pedagogical methods central to Teaching for Understanding and Disciplinary Understanding on which we have drawn in our professional development accredited programs over many years. Our findings suggest that it is possible to develop a robust language of theory and practice across the disciplines that advances teaching and learning within and beyond the disciplines
Fourth Space: An Autoethnography of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Micro-Community
Get PDFThe present study examines the collective reflections of a group of female, non-tenure track professors as they navigated the challenges of COVID-19 through a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) micro-community. This micro-community differs from more conventional communities of practice in that it allowed participants to create fourth spaces where their previously separate roles as teachers, scholars, parents, professionals, and community members merge together to provide more holistic support for its members. We argue that the intentional cultivation of fourth spaces within academia has the potential not only support faculty morale and retention in an era of mass resignations, but that well-balanced faculty can foster well-being in students, and even inspire how we all work together