Documentation:TDPforNewFaculty/NFOG
01. Get Started
WELCOME TO UBC!
As a new faculty member, your early days and weeks will be both energizing and overwhelming. As you prepare to teach new classes, meet new colleagues, and familiarize yourself with the UBC campus, you will inevitably experience moments that are both rewarding and perplexing. To help facilitate your transition, we have created this guide as a “first step” resource for you.
This guide is not a comprehensive compilation of all policies and documents that apply to new faculty, nor is it a repository of all information that could potentially be useful to new faculty. Instead, the guide is intended to be a starting point—a helpful collection of materials most commonly of interest to new faculty in their first year of teaching at UBC. When possible, links are provided to the websites of other resources and service units at UBC that may offer additional information and assistance on your journey.
Some of the topics we touch on in this guide include: understanding who your learners are, challenges you and your learners may face, considerations for the first day of class, assessing learning and giving feedback, pedagogical approaches with learning technology tools and much more! No matter where you are in the cycle of your course, you can quickly navigate this guide to find what you need.
NAVIGATING THIS GUIDE
Each section in this guide is structured using these five elements:
1. What is it: Provides a brief overview of the topic.
2. Why it Matters: Highlights implications for your role as a faculty member and impact on the learner experience.
3. Get Started: Provides an entry point to the topic.
4.Go Further: Provides additional links to learning resources and websites.
5. Faculty Spotlight: Showcases UBC faculty actively engaged in a particular topic.
A WORD ON EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
Educational leadership is a key component of the role of faculty in the Educational Leadership Stream, and is also relevant to faculty in the Professoriate Stream and to Lecturers. Educational leadership may be thought of as an impact of teaching and learning beyond one’s classroom. The Faculty Association Collective Agreement defines it as “activity taken at UBC and elsewhere to advance innovation in teaching and learning with impact beyond one’s classroom” (Article 4.04). Educational leadership activities include, but are not limited to, contributions to curriculum, activities that advance equity and inclusion in teaching and learning, formal teachingrelated leadership responsibilities within your Department/Program/Faculty and engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
The CTLT has a number of resources to support how you think about and track the evidence and impact of your educational leadership activities. For more information, visit ctlt.ubc.ca/edleadership or email us at ctlt.info@ubc.ca. If you are in the Educational Leadership Stream and joining UBC’s teaching and learning community, we encourage you to join the Educational Leadership Network, a community of Instructors, Senior Instructors and Professors of Teaching. For more information, please visit blogs.ubc.ca/edleadershipnetwork.
02. CLASSROOM CLIMATE AND OUR CAMPUS
WHAT IS IT
Classroom climate is an important consideration because it invites us to consider additional layers of context for situating complex classroom situations. UBC’s Vancouver campus has a multilayered and complex history. This is mirrored by the diversity of perspectives and experiences that exist on this campus. For this reason, UBC classrooms are not static and neutral spaces; rather, they continue to be multidimensional and dynamic spaces where complex interactions occur through the diversity of identities, modes of delivery and places of learning. In their book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, Susan Ambrose and her colleagues define classroom climate as “the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical environments in which our students learn.” Different aspects of the classroom climate and student development—intellectual and social identity development in particular—interact with each other to have an impact on student learning, experience and performance.
WHY IT MATTERS
The historical setting of a classroom can inform and guide the ways students learn from the institutional contexts surrounding the classroom. UBC’s Vancouver campus is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded lands of the Musqueam people, which informs the history and fabric of learning here. The role of the instructor is an integral part of the classroom climate framework because the instructor models ways to engage with concepts, histories and intersecting layers that challenge and add to the way that we understand and have come to know our respective disciplines, the lands we are learning on and the relationships that exist.
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GET STARTED
As an instructor, you can design, conceptualize and integrate aspects of classroom climate into your practice through the approaches you take in your curriculum and the learning environment you create. In this guide, you can explore ways to do this as early as the first day of class.
Faculty Spotlight
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I am teaching a fourth-year seminar this term that specifically looks at the politics of the university. In this seminar, we will reflect as a learning community on a variety of topics, including UBC’s location on unceded Musqueam territory, questions of positionality and accessibility and why they matter for how we experience the university. Excessive emotions, such as anger, are particularly challenging for classroom spaces—challenging because they force us to acknowledge that trust, belonging and community in learning relationships and spaces are never a guarantee and, in fact, take constant tending. These excessive emotions are also challenging in a second way, which is that, in some classrooms, they arise out of social structural dynamics—e.g., misogyny, racism, colonialism, homophobia—that may or may not be the central focus of a course, but that nevertheless exist in classroom spaces through the very bodies and minds that are in these spaces. |