Creating Spaces of Belonging in Academia – February 5, 2020

Event Date & Time

Event Description

***Note: This session is intended for Graduate Students, and Undergraduate and Graduate TAs only. We invite Faculty and Staff to sign up for our sessions during CTLT’s Spring, Summer, and Winter Institutes.

This session is rescheduled from January 15, 2020.

Do you belong here? We all need to find a sense of belonging in our places of learning and teaching. For people with disabilities, this can be particularly challenging in environments that are inaccessible and unwelcoming. In this workshop you will have the opportunity to learn about how a sense of belonging develops in higher education contexts and how you can create spaces of greater belonging.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

• Apply knowledge and experience from this workshop and previous experiences to discuss what disability is and appropriate terms to use.
• Describe what kinds of barriers people disabilities experience
• Discuss respectful ways to interact with people who have disabilities
• Identify at least three strategies for making your own places of teaching and learning more welcoming for people with disabilities
• Describe three ways you can change your behaviour/create impact on an interpersonal level

Eligibility

The TA Institute is open to all undergraduate TAs, graduate students who are interested in teaching, and all graduate student TAs. This session is not open to general undergraduate students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, or faculty.

Facilitators

Laura Yvonne Bulk (@LYBOT) is a friend, learner, woman, teacher, disabled person, occupational therapist, Christian, artist, scholar, advocate, and activist. Her work focuses on enhancing understanding and promoting human dignity. As a public scholar, Laura aims to benefit the wider community and the academic and clinical communities, making purposeful social contributions and employing innovative forms of collaborative scholarship. She works in the areas of quality of life in palliative care; being blind and belonging in academia; inclusion of disabled people in healthcare professions; and the use of creative methods (including research-based theatre) and cross-sectoral partnerships to do research for the public good.

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To be completed – Pre/Post Session Online Module

Theme

If you wish to complete this workshop as part of the theme Inclusive, Student-Centered Learning, you must complete the pre-session online module by February 5 at 9 AM and the post-session online module by February 14 at noon to receive the letter of completion.

If you had previously registered for this session (for the cancelled January 15) and completed the pre-session online modules, you do not need to re-submit. If this is your first time registering for this session, you must complete the pre-session online module by the above deadline.

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TA Institute

This year’s TA Institute includes sessions on Inclusive, Student-Centered Learning, Teaching Career Preparations, Teaching Fundamentals, Transformative Growth in Learning, and Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning. If you are interested in impacting your current or future TAships, or in improving your teaching skills, be sure to join us for one or more of these 2 hour, interactive workshops.

This year, workshops in the TA institute are organized into 5 themes, and if you complete 3 workshops in a theme, and do the related pre- & post-session online modules, you are eligible for a letter of completion that you can include in your Teaching Portfolio and CV. These letters will include a brief description of any themes that you completed, and how the work you did in those themes supports your development as a teacher.

This year’s themes are:

• Inclusive, Student-Centered Learning 
• Teaching Career Preparations 
• Teaching Fundamentals 
• Transformative Growth in Learning
• Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning