“We all are living a trauma-lived experience, we have been for quite some time now, especially around COVID.”

Gagne was one of four panelists in a discussion panel January 26 who shared perspectives on incorporating trauma-informed principles into online and blended teaching. The discussion panel marks the first time the partner institutions of the Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub have collaborated on a panel discussion to support students and increase student success.

The panelists shared their passion for helping students feel safe wherever teaching takes place. Discussion was wide-ranging and lively, covering the topics of curriculum development, course syllabi, course assessment, and how to improve the online spaces where courses are taught.

Participation by more than 60 attendees showed the growing interest in developing the teaching skills that create a safe space where learning can happen more easily.

“At Assiniboine Community College, when the pandemic hit, the first thing we did was create a quality assurance measure that talked about the minimal things we need to do online to make sure that our learners are okay,” said Sheryl Prouse, Senior Advisor, Student Affairs and Interim Director, Learning Commons. Most of the items were common sense. “I need to make sure I introduce myself. I need to make sure I have online office hours. I need to make sure I point people to where they can get help, I need to make my site easily navigable – thinking about the user experience on the other end.”

Prouse also described how instructors can sometimes re-traumatize students unintentionally through assignments. “When we’re asking students to do things like self-reflective exercises, please align those with your learning outcomes and stop being intrusive,” she said. Students should not have to reflect upon abusive childhoods, she explained. Instead, they could be asked to relay an experience with a child they worked with or could use a case study that is depersonalized from their own experience.

Panelists agreed that building predictability and routine into the course syllabus – and also some flexibility – are all ways to help students navigate their learning experience and balance competing demands of other courses, work, and family.

“We don’t know what they’re currently experiencing,” said Jocelyn Lavich, Faculty Instructor in the Department of Nursing at RRC Polytech and a marriage and family therapist.

“Something I do in the first or second class, is collaborate with them to develop a contract for a shared safe space. I want to hear from all students, what they feel is important for them, what they’d like others to know on how they feel safe in the room, so that learning continues to happen.”

All the panelists emphasized the importance of ensuring that students aren’t passive learners but instead active contributors in the learning process.

“I absolutely believe in a collaborative learning process, learning from each other in different ways, the small group work, and overall working on leveling out that power imbalance [between instructors and students],” Lavich said. She and others expressed the importance of instructors allowing students to fail, allowing multiple attempts for mastery, and creating choices where possible for ways students can present assignments.

“Whether it’s in person or online, we have to be very clear and consistent in our expectations,” said Lori Doan, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Developer at UM and Sessional Instructor at the International College of Manitoba. 

“I think what is really important is owning our mistakes. Admitting when we’ve made a mistake. Apologize for it and make it right. I used to tell my students I will always err on the side of what benefits them. I can say that, but they need to see me do that to be able to trust me.”

The panelists were clearly inspired by each others’ passion for improving the student experience and agreed that so much more can be done for students once one becomes familiar with trauma-informed principles. They agreed that building trust with students is critical, and that instructors need to be aware of the things in their own experiences that might get in the way of providing trauma-informed teaching, such as stress, and the degree to which one is feeling supported in one’s own life.

Learn more

The Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub (MB Hub) is a resource for post-secondary instructors in Manitoba. We provide service to partner instructors and departments through improvements in both the quality and quantity of higher education online and blended courses in Manitoba and the use of technology within teaching and learning.

Learn more about the work we do at the Manitoba Flexible Learning Hub by visiting our website or subscribing to our newsletter.

The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning offers the Teaching and Learning Certificate program with the goal of helping prepare educators for the challenges of teaching in modern classrooms. 2023 TLC graduate Rhonda Dube, from the College of Nursing, shared her experience with the program: “The TLC program was a lot of hard work, but I think that’s why the celebration is that much sweeter. This program has helped to develop me into a better person, a better teacher, and a better colleague.”  

Designed for faculty and instructors who are in their first five years of teaching, TLC accommodates the busy schedules of faculty by offering limited classroom hours, flexible workshop offerings, supportive mentoring and providing individualized teaching feedback. The program focuses on pedagogical principles while providing teachers with foundational knowledge that can be applied in the classroom. Cintia Costa, an Educational Developer from The Centre, was a teaching mentor in the program. She spoke about her mentee Punam Mehta, who is an Instructor in the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences. “I admire Punam’s commitment with her students, feminism, and social justice as she always went above and beyond to help prepare better health professionals. Ones who are inclusive and understanding of helping everyone.” 

The Teaching and Learning Certificate program exemplifies UM’s commitment to producing skilled and compassionate educators who positively impact the future of education in Manitoba. Congratulations to the 2023 TLC graduates.  

Read the full list of 2023 TLC graduates 

Learn more about the TLC program 

Even if you are not enrolled in the TLC program, you can attend a TLC workshop. Explore TLC workshops. 

A safe place to make mistakes

Giving students a safe space to take on real-world challenges is key for Instructor Katherine Isaac in the Faculty of Architecture’s Environmental Design program. In her Professional Practice course, students create a “request for proposal” (RFP) for an architecture project; they then role play and become the client who is receiving the RFP. This self- and peer-evaluation exercise allows learners to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their work “and to have reality-based conversations,” she says.

Instructor Jenna Tichon, whose statistics classes in the Faculty of Science are often large, shared how she has scaled up experiential learning techniques and uses authentic assessment and student self-reflection to help her learners succeed.

“I value that in university and science, people are able to say, ‘I think I’m making a mistake, I did something wrong, there might be an issue here.’” She believes that if that opportunity isn’t built into the learning experience, “the consequences of people not being able to speak up can be incredibly severe.”

Stepping outside one’s comfort zone

Encouraging students to overcome their reticence has been rewarding for Professor Peter Kulchyski of the Department of Indigenous Studies. His six-week “bush school” in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island is land-based education and community-based learning at its most challenging.

“I’m very deliberate about working with communities and seeing them differently,” he says. Students are encouraged to look for community strengths and avoid colonial-based thinking. His visitors are to be mindful of three things when interacting with community members: impacts on the learner, impacts on the setting being learned in and impacts on those who might receive the learners during the experience. 

We are ‘doing beings’

Senior Instructor Colleen Plumton in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management has been a proponent of experiential learning for more than 20 years, and she has seen how it can ignite students’ curiosity as a result. For those looking to try it, she says, “It comes from believing in our students and ourselves. Our students want this. Remember that we are doing beings, we are not sitting beings.”  

She encouraged instructors to seek out the help available through the Centre and the Office of Experiential Learning. “We have a collection of humans to support one another.”

Compelling stories and useful advice

Attendee Mona Maxwell, Education Developer with the Centre, summed up the value of hearing the panel’s collective knowledge. “I left feeling secure that the enduring impact that a well-crafted experiential learning activity can have on a learner justifies the extra effort and risk-taking needed to overcome the barriers to creating them,” she says. “The panel convinced me that experiential learning binds our discipline content and lifts it off the pages of the text, while creating learners who appreciate the autonomy, self-growth and sense of accomplishment of their experiential learning experience for years to come.”

Since 2017, the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has hosted an annual Teaching Café to celebrate teaching innovation at the university. UM educators share their teaching strategies and discuss, in a roundtable format, the lessons they have learned. The Café is open to all UM faculty and instructors, and lunch is provided.

Learn more

Learn more about the Teaching and Learning Certificate.

Learn more about experiential learning.

“Knowing how to do good work isn’t enough,” keynote speaker Phillip Dawson told the audience of UM professors in attendance May 31.  “Students also need evaluative judgement—the ability to make decisions about the quality of their own work and others’.  This is especially important in a world of generative artificial intelligence.”  A recognized expert on assessment and academic integrity from Australia’s Deakin University, Dawson urged attendees to consider assessment as a powerful focus for SoTL research.   

Opportunity to investigate one’s teaching practices

Each year, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Support Fund provides opportunities for professors, instructors and librarians to meaningfully engage in research projects that increase knowledge in pedagogy and enhance student learning.  The SoTL Symposium is an important opportunity for recipients of Major Project and Seed Project funding to showcase their projects and share their findings with the UM community.

“As devoted and caring professionals, we strive for the best learning experience for our students,” said Diane Hiebert-Murphy, Provost and Vice-President (Academic), in her opening remarks.  “That’s why systematic inquiry about teaching approaches and practice is a priority at the University of Manitoba.” 

Most of the projects presented in this year’s symposium were funded in 2020 and conducted as COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and emergency online learning went into effect.  The pandemic also delayed plans for the SoTL Symposium, and this year marks the first time the event has been held.  “Dissemination is a key component of SoTL research, and we finally have the opportunity to share these important findings with the UM community,” said Janet Cape, a SoTL Developer at the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Cape says that plans are underway for an expanded SoTL Symposium in 2024, which will include a day of workshops and welcome SoTL researchers from across Manitoba. 

The results of three Major Projects and eight Seed Projects were shared at this year’s symposium.  Here are some highlights.

Major projects span disciplines

Hagar Labouta was curious about how best to foster the development of interdisciplinary skills among students trained in different natural science research disciplines.  She examined the experiences of research assistants in her nanoscience laboratory and found that clear communication, mentorship and teamwork were essential components of learning interdisciplinary nanoscience research.

Kathryn Levine observed that while social workers, educators and school psychologists work to help children in care of the child welfare system to achieve greater academic success, these professionals have limited knowledge of each other’s mandates, values and ethics and roles and responsibilities.  The Major Project funding she received led to the development of a unique interdisciplinary course that brought together educators and social workers to explore how children can be better supported within a framework of collective responsibility. 

Jillian Seniuk Cicek and Jeff Paul explored the efficacy of educational tools developed to facilitate “just-in-time” instructor training and examined the impact on STEM students’ engagement, motivation and retention. Among the interventions that they developed, Cicek and Paul created PowerPoint templates that provided pedagogical “nudges” to help faculty incorporate research-based teaching practices.

Seed Fund projects lead to student growth

After learning about mastery-based grading at grading conferences and in research articles, Xinli Wang waited until she had a small enough second-year mathematics course to explore the concept properly. The mastery-based grading was more intensive for Wang, but it provided added benefits for her students. “Because we don’t use points, we have the time and space to allow for failure and growth,” Wang shared. “Each student’s grade is based on the evidence that they can eventually provide of mastery, rather than a one-time all-or-nothing exam score that may or may not measure their true knowledge at the end of the semester.”

Celine Latulipe knows the benefits of team-based active learning approaches and proposed to evaluate a system for implementing these approaches in classroom spaces designed for traditional lecturing.  When the pandemic disrupted her plans, she quickly pivoted to examine active learning in online spaces.  She found that Gather.Town—a 2D virtual world platform—provided “a sense of place” that felt like a real classroom, allowing her students to socialize and move easily between full class discussions and group work.  “Overall, Gather.Town allowed students to feel socially more connected to their peers while learning online in a way that general-purpose video conferencing tools such as Zoom did not, which is critical for inclusive learning,” says Latulipe.  The tool has since been adopted in other UM classes in Computer Science, Biological Sciences, and Physics.

Julie Pfeffer wanted students to stop using questionable online digital resources to gain an understanding of practical lab situations in dentistry. She explored providing students with two versions of video tutorials: one that was infused with humour throughout and one that was a matter-of-fact procedural.  She was surprised to find that students appreciated both – they liked the humourous video as an introduction to the topic and the matter-of-fact video to review important details. Unsurprisingly, her students wanted more of both of her high-quality videos.

Have an idea for SoTL funding?

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Support Fund provides grants for a variety of projects every year. 

Seed Projects of up to $6,000 examine factors that influence student learning and include SoTL research questions related to how instructors can use various teaching methods and technology to strengthen their teaching practice. 

Major Projects of up to $25,000 support SoTL research initiatives that influence student learning that are interdisciplinary and often span across faculties, colleges, or schools. 

For further information about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Support Fund and other supports, visit the Academic supports for faculty web page.

To work with a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Developer on your SoTL project, contact The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at thecentre@umanitoba.ca.