Reflections on the DCUTL 2024 Keynotes
At this year’s conference,
we had the honour of receiving the wisdom of Dr. Nadine de Gannes (opening keynote, “The Experimental Educator”) and Dr. Ann Braithwaite (closing keynote, “How Stories Matter: Rethinking Citational Practices And Disciplinary Knowledges”). Here, a handful of the Centre for Learning and Teaching’s staff and Faculty Associates contribute their reflections on these excellent talks.
karen GAllant, Phd
CLT Faculty Associate
Associate Professor and Division Head, Recreation and Leisure Studies
School of Health and Human Performance
For me, Dr. Nadine de Gannes’ keynote presentation inspired reflection on the opportunity we have as course instructors to create spaces for learning in our classrooms, not just about the course material, but about ourselves, each other, and about how to live in a way that advances social justice. Drawing on examples from her own teaching in the Ivey Business School at Western University, she described academics and curricula as deeply embedded in human experiences. She says that for instructors, “a classroom is a space in which we communicate what we really value”, challenging us to reflect on what values we communicate in our own classrooms when we choose to give time (or not) to social justice issues, to topics that connect to students’ interests and life stories, and to relationality. She describes the classroom as a place to embrace humanity, to share your true self, to make mistakes, and to learn. She cautioned that while the pace of life today suggests we have to be ready to respond immediately to any questions or issues that come up in the classroom (which is daunting to many instructors and the reason why some choose not to delve into controversial issues in class), in fact we can acknowledge areas of concern even if we aren’t fully prepared to explore them at the present moment—and then we can respond through an announcement or in a future class. It is through sharing our own humanity, including who we are and what is important to us, and even our mistakes, that we can encourage relationality and learning about both ourselves and others. She says: “if we are honest in sharing what we know about ourselves, we let students know what we want them to learn or acknowledge about themselves.”
Elizabeth gillis, phd
Associate Director (acting), CLT
The closing keynote at the conference delved into the topic of the visibility of relationships and people in our teaching practice, including the ways that we think about knowledge and design curriculum. The discussion highlighted, through a variety of examples, why it can be important to consider what and who remains unseen and asked us to dive into a practice that we may rarely question. As someone who works in curriculum and with groups as they map components of their programs, I reflected on how these questions could bring a valuable perspective to curriculum mapping processes and shed light on the inclusivity and diversity of our educational content.
As Dr. Braithwaite spoke, I was reminded of readings I had included in a recent course I took on open education. The course included readings on intellectual property and traditional knowledge (TK), outlining traditional knowledge labels (TKL) as a means of recognizing the cultural context embedded within knowledge. These labels stand out to me as a powerful tool for reimagining knowledge ownership and respect—offering a nuanced approach beyond mere citation. They instead invite us to consider knowledge as something beyond individual property. I believe the keynote invited me again to consider this question, underscoring the idea that acknowledging sources is not just about giving credit but also about inviting people in and honouring knowledge.
Rachelle mckay
Educational Developer (Indigenous Knowledges and Ways of Knowing)
Ann Braithwaite’s closing keynote asked us to reflect on what it means to have an inclusive syllabus and the work that it takes to get there. As Braithwaite described, citations implicitly tell others who and what we value and how we know what we know. Citations are political. They can be used to re-affirm disciplinary orders or push back against them, making syllabi sites of possibility for citational justice. As Braithwaite spoke, I was reminded of calls to “#DecolonizeYourSyllabus” first articulated by Latinx scholar Yvette DeChavez. As Joseph M. Pierce (@PepePierce) writes on X, decolonizing your syllabus “means admitting to students that ‘the canon’ or ‘the method’ is flawed. Because it is.” (2022) Disciplinary traditions that have positioned certain bodies as core to the discipline, while “invisibilizing” others, serve to (re)produce and de-limit knowledge. As Braithwaite contends, who is and isn’t on the syllabus reflects who is and isn’t represented as knowers; “who is and isn’t in the room, quite literally sometimes.” (Braithwaite DCUTL)
Inserting a single Black or Indigenous-authored text (or both) into your syllabus isn’t decolonization or citational justice. Decolonization and citational justice call on us to critically question why these absences exist in the first place and consider how the fundamental premises of our disciplines are predicated on settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, ableism, heteropatriarchy, and eurocentrism. Only then will we be able to undo some of the harm that these citational legacies have caused.
Lindsay Mcniff
CLT Faculty Associate
Lecturer & IM Subject Specialist (Dalhousie Libraries)
School of Information Management
“Common knowledge,” which was named briefly during the Q & A, was on my mind throughout Ann Braithwaite’s closing keynote. The presentation focused on questions of who we cite and don’t cite (including the “everyday uncited backdrop”—one of the many compelling ways she referred to that kind of knowledge throughout the presentation) rather than why you need to cite and what happens when you don’t cite, which is usually how it’s framed to students. Fortunately, there has been a lot of consideration in recent years about reframing citation practices in a more positive and less punitive light for students. In the graduate courses I teach, I don’t teach the mechanics of citation directly; in my librarian role, I do this frequently. Common knowledge is a citational grey area – knowledge that may or may not need to be cited depending on the audience (what is common knowledge to whom?), and yet there is no set rule on what is and is not common knowledge. I’ve heard that if something is cited in at least five sources it’s common knowledge (I won’t cite where I got this information because I swear I’ve seen it in at least five sources!), which seems both wrong and laborious to sort out. Which leaves us with a kind of you-know-it-when-you-see-it vibe, which implies a whole host of assumptions, or check with your professor. What it boils down to is that common knowledge is the second type of knowledge that might not need to be cited (the other type being your own ideas, though we could ask all kinds of questions about where those come from that would require us to think in a different relational way as Braithwaite has prompted us to do). I love Ahmed’s notion of citation as reproductive technology. If common knowledge includes ideas that are so taken for granted that we aren’t even required to provide a pathway to our readers to help them trace the origin of that knowledge in order to better understand it, question it, etc., I wonder if certain types of uncited common knowledge have a similar function.
Shazia Nawaz awan, Ed.d
Educational Developer (Internationalization & Intercultural Competency)
Keynotes at conferences are expected to spotlight the central theme and draw the audience’s attention to the topic. Opening keynotes, specifically, set the tone for the conference and inspire the audience to draw connections as they attend concurrent sessions at the conference. Dr. Nadine de Gannes’ opening keynote on the first day of DCULT 2024 did just that and more. It shed the spotlight on the central theme of the conference ‘Transforming the Curriculum to (Re)Imagine the Future’, and for me, set the tone for the rest of the conference and inspired me to reflect on transforming the curriculum and to reflect on (re) imagining the future of teaching and learning in universities.
Nadine’s talk motivates us to (i) call out and call in (ii) not to respond in the moment (iii) articulate positions from which we speak, and (iv) for curriculum, reflect on topics that “are not a fodder for academic study but they’re embedded in human lives”. As Nadine spoke seemingly from her heart as there was no script and no deck of slides and as paced back and forth on the stage of the Potter Auditorium, she smiled and looked as if she made eye contact with audience, and as if she hoped her stories made sense to all of us. For me, the inspiration was in the language she used around honest and open relationships with students. She mentioned “deception versus secrecy, patience versus pivot, ego versus humanity, best practices versus best mistakes, and positionality versus identity” and offered strategies (use data to make decisions, be mindful of affinity biases, take teaching as seed planting and watering) for educators to navigate and/or steer through their teaching experiences. As I was listening to Nadine’s stories, I felt a relationship as she talked about curriculum and discussions as starting points and about creating spaces and building capacity; however, I felt not so connected when the good intentioned advice ‘you can walk away, you can say no’ was given because I feel not all of us are fortunate and have the option to walk away. I remind myself of Sarah Ahmed’s “when you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about it or if you went away.” It was clear, though, in Dr. De Ganne’s case, she had helped build a network of colleagues and left behind pathways for others to take up the hard work.
laurel schut
CLT Faculty Associate
Associate Director (interim), College of Sustainability
It’s been my observation that sometimes as teachers, it’s the sidebar discussions or small comments we say that really stick with students as ‘aha’ moments, and I’d like to highlight a moment at the beginning of Dr. Nadine De Ganne’s opening keynote that had this impact on me. Nadine began her talk by frankly telling us that “For the first few minutes of my keynote, I will be quite nervous” with what seemed (at least to me) to be a simple matter of observation without self-judgement. I’ve never actually seen a speaker just state this information up front (!), but I’m sure many of us can relate to increased nerves during the first few minutes of a big lecture or facilitation that then smooth out. By starting her keynote with a public recognition of her humanity—we all get nervous sometimes!—Nadine opened the space for her call in for more experimental educators who try new things in the name of trust and vulnerability, and therefore will not be perfect, consistently unflappable, or without emotional investment. As Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) becomes more integrated into post-secondary curricula via courses, programs, and student support services, Nadine's acknowledgement of how she was feeling absolutely set the tone for the conference for me: You’re welcome here in this space, as you are, with all your feelings about teaching and learning. That’s what we are trying to create for our students, and this moment reminded me of how moving it can be when we as faculty members, in our places of relative privilege in the university, choose to integrate the social-emotional into our teaching spaces as part of our common humanity.
kate thompson, phd
Educational Developer (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)
I’ve been thinking lately about trust in the classroom, and this is something that came up as a central theme in Dr. de Gannes’ keynote. Many of the practices she described (all powerful, empathetic teaching practices) boiled down to building trust between you (the instructor) and your students. There are, I think, a lot of ways to build trust… but it’s not simple. It’s difficult to quantify (though, we are trying!).
There is also a fine line to tread. We need to open ourselves up to our students, we need to be our authentic selves. But we also cannot fully open up. She mentioned the difference (or tension?) between secrecy/privacy and deception. We need to be able to be truly authentic (authentically authentic?), while still selecting only a subset of ourselves to share.
It’s important to try, though… her main point about building trust is that it is the basis that is required to deal with the unexpected and complex issues that arise which we can never fully prepare for in advance. A basis of trust provides a sense that even if things don’t go the way they should have, things will still be okay. That we will decide collectively what is right, and “make it so” as best we can. When things can’t be made right, we will be there for one another. It feels a little daunting to try and build a class culture like that. It’s exciting, too!