By Dario Balca
As Carleton’s Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning), Joy Mighty knew she wanted to get students more engaged, but didn’t want to just give out orders on how.
The result is a new initiative that brings together faculty, staff and students from across the university to share their thoughts on how to better engage students in their learning.
The 36-member Teaching and Learning Council (TLC) includes people from all parts of the university, such as the Paul Menton Centre, Career Services, the Library, and the Student Experience Office. It supports the Teaching and Learning Framework, a document that lays out Carleton’s educational goals until 2018.
“I didn’t want to be the one to say you must do this or you must do that,” says Mighty. “My view is that, to achieve the goals of the framework, you need everybody across the university working together.”
The TLC is divided into five action teams that are exploring different areas of student engagement. Some of the members are working on experiential learning, retention, career and skills, and teaching and learning spaces. Others, like French professor Chantal Dion, are dealing with student engagement and satisfaction.
“The process is about taking stock of all the literature about student engagement as well as our own experiences and making this knowledge available not only to us, but students as well so that they feel more engaged in their learning,” says Dion.
The council will look at past research, student surveys, and their own experience in order to come up with a list of deliverable initiatives that well help Carleton students be more academically engaged.
Boris Vukovic, a disabilities co-ordinator at the PMC, says the makeup of the council reflects the need to recognize Carleton’s diverse student population when talking about student engagement.
“I find Carleton to be exceptionally diverse compared to some of the other institutions and I think that’s one of its greatest strengths,” he says. “It allows those who traditionally face barriers to getting post secondary education to do exactly that, but that means we are no longer just teaching whom you’d think of as traditional students and it’s a challenge Carleton has to be prepared for.”
Mighty is confident the varied perspectives in the council will reflect the university’s increasingly diverse student population.
“The synergy of having people with all these different perspectives look at the same issues will be even better than anyone’s individual perspective,” she says.
The action teams will meet separately at various times throughout the term and then bring their ideas to the council, which will meet as a whole once or twice each term.
Learn more about the Teaching and Learning Council and its members here.