Date: Wednesday, August 28th, 2024
Time: 1:00-2:00pm (AT) / 12:00-1:00pm (ET) / 9:00-10:00am (PT)
Workshop Description:
The Fictional Classrooms project was born out of conversations about how we might attempt to reach faculty that did not typically engage with standard educational development offerings. While book clubs and reading groups have homes in many teaching and learning centres and communities, these tend to focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning and other kinds of “academic” texts.
Coming from humanities disciplines (English Literature and History, respectively), Matthew Dunleavy and Robin Sutherland-Harris (York University) asked themselves if there was space in educational development for fiction. This led them to one guiding question: What can we learn about our own teaching practices and identities from fictional depictions of higher education?
We asked faculty to join us to explore and reflect on narratives of education in films, television, short stories, and novels, whether they speak to us as learners, educators, researchers, artists, or simply as humans.
During this presentation, Matthew will share what we have observed over two years of Fictional Classrooms, what we have learned from some of the texts we have used (which include, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020), Akira Kurosawa’s Madadayo (1993), Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch (2023), and James Bridges’ The Paper Chase (1973), to name just a few), and the potential growth we see for this project (including the current expansion of a national Fictional Classrooms group of educational developers, a specific offering for Physiotherapist educators across Canada, and our very own YU + TFS forthcoming offering).
Following this introduction, participants will be invited to see how this works for themselves. While we do not have time to read a novel or watch a film, we will read poetry together and engage in dialogue and reflection.
Matthew Dunleavy (he/him) is an educational developer and scholarly teacher with over 9+ years’ experience. He immediately joins our CTEI from York University where he was an Educational Developer with the Teaching Commons; before entering that role, he served as the Program Director of the Online Learning and Technology Consultants (OLTC) Program at the Maple League of Universities (Acadia University; Bishop’s University; Mount Allison University; and St. Francis Xavier University). In 2022, he was awarded the D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) for this work.
