Bishop's University Teaching and Learning Centre

04/12/2024

Join us for a celebration of SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY!

Thursday, April 18 at 12:30 pm Bishop's University Professor JESSICA RIDDELL is discussing the book she co-authored, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning.

Link for Dr. Riddell's biography: https://www.jessicariddell.com/

In person in the Atwater Library's Adair Auditorium and online by Zoom – your choice.

It's free and everyone is welcome.

To REGISTER for the Zoom link, go here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuezlaIY2mhl3-LaxcO1r86ggtkgeXFFRRnL39-fGhElBLcQ/viewform

There's no registration process for in-person attendance. It's first come, first seated.

03/19/2024

Please join us for a special Maple League of Universities Book club this spring! Online, in small groups, facilitated by wonderful educators, these book clubs take two chapters per session for a wonderful community-centred experience for faculty, staff, administrators and anyone interested in the higher education sector.

Join us this May-July for a six session reading of Dr. Jessica Riddell's new book Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing (MQUP 2024).

Over the course of ten chapters, Dr. Riddell reflects on her experience in governance, senior administration, and scholarship to provide a how-to guide for developing the conceptual tools to seek solutions to higher education's most pressing issues.

We will meet once every other week to discuss these chapters and exchange ideas about the current state of universities and the hope circuits we can build together across Canada and beyond.

Registration will open soon.

Mount Allison University | StFX University | Bishop's University | Acadia University | Maple League of Universities

01/08/2023

03/28/2022

In the past month we have witnessed the horrors – writ large in the news and across social media platforms – of the invasion of a sovereign nation; Russia has instigated a war against Ukraine and against the fundamental principles of democracy. We are reeling as citizens, as parents, as educators, and as leaders. Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic that is still very much ongoing, many are reporting feelings exhaustion, disorientation, and grief. How are we supposed to make sense of the horror and heartbreak – and continue to learn, teach, research, and work in impossible conditions? Here is a piece about one classroom that encourages students to name, claim, and aim their discomfort. Bishop's University Bishop's University Library Learning Commons

In the past month we have witnessed the horrors – writ large in the news and across social media platforms – of the invasion of a sovereign nation; Russia has instigated a war against Ukraine and against the fundamental principles of democracy. How are we supposed to make sense of the horror and...

03/01/2022

Registration is now open for the Maple League Pedagogy, Edu-Technology, and Learning (PETAL) workshops series! Starting March 17th, the OLTC Program is offering a series of free online sessions every Thursday at 9 AM. When you complete four or more workshops (of your choice) you will receive a record of completion to put on your resume! It's free and open to students from all disciplines.

Spaces are limited, so sign up today! Scan the QR code or go to the OLTC's website (https://www.bishopsoltc.com/microwil) to find all the registrations links and sessions details.

02/12/2022

We’re excited to announce that Shakesperience is returning for the summer of 2022!

This once-in-a-lifetime course offers you a chance to do a deep dive into six plays presented at the world-renowned Stratford Festival, and work directly with the artists involved.

Presented by Bishop's University, and taught by Dr. Jessica Riddell – with guest professors Dr. Lisa Dickson (UNBC) and Dr. Shannon Murray (UPEI) – Shakesperience is open to students from across the Maple League!

Session Dates are June 27-July 1 in Stratford, Ontario.

Registration deadline is May 16th, for more information visit BUshakesperience.com or email [email protected]

02/01/2022

A blog from Dr. Jessica Riddell: "As we look back on [COVID and the global pandemic], we’ve done and experienced (and felt) so many things. Time has been, as Hamlet remarks, “out of joint,” insofar as it expands and contracts in ways that seem to bend the space-time continuum. Our days feel like weeks, while hours sometime stretch on with an elasticity that has us asking “what day is it?”

Time has animated the two courses I have had the pleasure of teaching this term; the regular weekly connections with students alongside intrepid literary guides (Milton and Shakespeare) have helped me frame our present experience in the context of the past (those early modern writers knew a lot about plagues and lock downs). And yet the question at the top of mind has also been “what does the future look like in a post-Covid world?” We train students in the humanities to go back to the past to illuminate the present and innovate the future. This skill set is particularly urgent at this moment in time.

In grappling with the complexities of past, present, and future, John Milton (17th century author of Paradise Lost) counters linear time with the eternal present. In his formulation, a divine presence exists beyond earthly constraints, occupying a spiritual dimension that embraces and contains all expressions of time. (Milton anticipates we might feel disoriented by this: in Paradise Lost Raphael reassures Adam that our puny human brains will find it hard to grapple with such overwhelming metaphysical concepts). Now, while we cannot sit, “dove-like … brooding on the vast Abyss” as Milton’s heavenly Muse is wont to do, we can still step outside of our present moment to engage in critical reflection on what has happened and prepare for what is to yet to come.

One way to mark time is by reflecting on our own transformation. "

As we look back on the past three months, we’ve done and experienced (and felt) so many things. Time has been, as Hamlet remarks, “out of joint,” insofar as it expands and contracts in ways that seem to bend the space-time continuum. Our days feel like weeks, while hours sometime stretch on wi...

01/31/2022

In this blog by Dr. Lisa Dickson, we learn about critical empathy and precarious care in the classroom and beyond.

Here is an excerpt:
"In his book, Radical Hope, Kevin Gannon observes that time spent in college did not educate away the racist and anti-Semitic impulses of students who marched in Charlottesville shouting hateful slogans. Jonathan Dollimore notes in the revised introduction to his book, Radical Tragedy, that a love of art and music did not stop N***s from perpetrating the atrocities of the Holocaust. These are the kinds of observations that leave a mark on the brain. Both of these texts point to the elephant in the Humanities classroom, a critical caveat to the comfortable assertion that Humanities education makes us more empathetic people. These examples raise the deeply disruptive specter that there is no necessary connection between empathy and education in the arts, or that, if there is, it is not at all a direct path to fellow-feeling.

And yet. And yet, the belief that there is a connection persists in me, troubled and contested but stubbornly assertive. I want to say that, in the case of the perpetrators of violence in these examples, someone did art appreciation wrong, or was not educated the right way, or was educated in the wrong context, or, or, or...."

In his book, Radical Hope, Kevin Gannon observes that time spent in college did not educate away the racist and anti-Semitic impulses of students who marched in Charlottesville shouting hateful slogans. Jonathan Dollimore notes in the revised introduction to his book, Radical Tragedy, that a love of...

01/28/2022

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can make you a better student. I really meant Gawain as just one example of the disciplinary material we can use to make space for metacognition in first-year courses, for students to stop and think about their own learning and to imagine themselves as the heroes of their own journeys: but Gawain’s is an example of a particular kind, one that I could have benefited from as an undergraduate. It is a story of failure." Curious? Keep reading this blog from Dr. Shannon Murray!

I adore Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though I came to it late. A colleague, Jane Magrath, would dance out of her class on this anonymous Medieval poem about Camelot, warm with delight in the humble and chivalrous knight, Sir Gawain, exclaiming how much she loved him. I started teaching the poem....

01/27/2022

As we navigate the complex conditions of in-person versus online learning, consent is a fundamental value - and should be present in all our conversations about how and when we engage.

01/26/2022

In a recent blog post, Dr. Jessica Riddell explores leadership in higher education.

The academy does not train people to be bosses.

Scholars? Yes. Educators? Sometimes. Leaders? Sure. But bosses? Rarely.

When academics move into positions where they are expected to manage staff and build dynamic teams, the skills they have developed as researchers, teachers, and leaders do not always translate easily into these new roles. As one of my favourite Canadian university presidents is wont to remark, “the only equation that matters is people.” However, when successful scholars and award-winning educators find themselves managing HR issues without the appropriate skill sets (including performance assessment, conflict management, and trust-building frameworks), a myriad of problems can and often do arise.

by Jessica Riddell The academy does not train people to be bosses. Scholars? Yes. Educators? Sometimes. Leaders? Sure. But bosses? Rarely. When academics move into positions where they are expected to manage staff and build dynamic teams, the skills they have developed as researchers, teachers, and....

01/25/2022

Check out this recent blog by Dr. Lisa Dickson that looks at the Netflix show Lucifer through the lens of pedagogy.

here is an excerpt:
"Learners, Lucifer suggests, grow in the spaces where the teacher’s omniscience is not in play, and where the learners know it’s not in play. We can hear that Luciferian suspicion of a cagy omniscience when students ask us what we “really want” them to say. Unless learners know that we are not omniscient, that we’re as embedded in time as they are (maybe with a little more time under our belts to give us some tools we can share), they will never trust their own learning, will always be looking for a hidden manipulation. There will always be a trust gap if students suspect that we’re only pretending to let them grow, having already determined what they are expected to become. Rather, if we begin from a place where “all things were possible,” where the end is not always already encoded in the design of the universe or the classroom, and if we make that known, we can let Lucifer become himself. We can be surprised by wings. Lucifer the series, comic, irreverent, challenging, sexy, asks us what a critically hopeful pedagogy would look like, if we could just embrace the misreadings, the misfires, the unexpected misappropriations of our “tradition” and make way for the coming of the new. "

By Lisa Dickson Throughout the six-season run of Lucifer (Fox/Netflix, 2016-2021), the Prince of Hell, Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis) believes that he’s running a prison. In the end, he discovers that, all along, he’s been running a school. In becoming himself, he ceases to be a reluctant jailo...