When: February 11, 2025 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM
Where: Room CAWP 2916 (Caseroom)
This event is free and will be held in person only.
Seminar Abstract
As Thomas King writes, if we want a new reality, tell a different story. What if we told a different story about the place of the classroom? What if we treated the classroom as a place where bodies have place-specific experiences crafted for them? What if, as Dave Stuart writes, our students experienced school not as something done to them but as a work of love crafted for them? What if we taught as if the material, and our students’ experience of the material, was a love letter to embodied learning? What if, as Mandy Len Catron argues, we imagined teaching as an opportunity to learn new skills, try on ideas, and maybe on a good day, find reprieve from the millions of other responsibilities and obligations of human life? My talk will argue for the value of storied teaching and learning, tell some stories about my two decade teaching career teaching writing, and amplify the voices of the people and stories who have influenced my teaching.
Speaker
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost describes The National Atlas of Sri Lanka: it “has seventy-three versions of the island —each template revealing only one aspect, one obsession: rainfall, winds, surface waters of lakes, rarer bodies of water locked deep within the earth”. An aspect of MY atlas, my 20+ year teaching career template, has been obsessed with stories. As Thomas King writes, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” After a one year run at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and a semester at Camosun College in Victoria, I’ve been at the University of British Columbia: 15 years in the English Department and 4 years in Forestry and LFS —teaching 157 sections of 13 different courses. A career teaching 95 writing classes (including LFS/NRES 150: Scholarly Writing and Argumentation) and 62 literature classes with a focus on our place-specific identities has also made me obsessed with the place of the classroom, and my own positionality in it —which is to say obsessed with storied, experiential teaching and learning.
About the Teaching & Learning Lunch Seminar Series
The Teaching & Learning Lunch Seminar Series features extraordinary in-house and external speakers highlighting teaching & learning experiences or pedagogical research in UBC Forestry and beyond. The lunchtime forum invites the interactive participation of the public surrounding the speakers’ presentations and will open wider discussions about education in Forestry and undergraduate instruction in general.