BC TEAL is proud to present our 2025 Annual Conference: Disruptive Educational Practices: Strategies for Transformation.
Please note that the Friday evening event, the TEAL Charitable Foundation Awards & Fundraiser, requires an additional ticket purchase. Please register here to secure your spot and join us in celebrating the awardees while fundraising for a better cause in TEAL.
Educators shine in times of change to face unexpected challenges. This is when creativity flourishes by combining proven practices with fresh and innovative ideas. These times call for transformation which can be rooted in tradition or experience, or it can arise through unexplored approaches. The synthesis of old and new ideas drives meaningful progress. Join other insightful and creative educators as we flourish within the power of our community.
The objective of this session is to raise attendees’ awareness of the importance of acquiring digital soft skills necessary for hybrid roles because such skills may not be incorporated into the curriculum. The presenters aim to present practical opportunities for developing these skills based on a comprehensive framework to enhance students’ adaptability, ethical decision-making, digital collaboration, and empathy in virtual settings. The practical suggestions offered in the session include:
Preparing Students for Hybrid Workplaces: Focusing on traditional milestones such as job interviews and resumes, tailored for hybrid work environments by conducting regular workshops on specific soft skills such as digital collaboration, empathy, and ethical decision-making. Students can also be offered personalized coaching sessions to help them identify and develop their soft skills.
Incorporating Digital Soft Skills: Integrating digital soft skills into educational programs to help students improve their collaboration, empathy, and ethical decision-making in hybrid workplaces (Walker & Venker Weidenbenner, 2019). Simulation-based learning (SBL) can be implemented to provide students with realistic, hands-on experiences in a controlled environment.
Exploring Innovative Technologies and Teaching Methods: Investigating new technologies and pedagogical approaches to enhance digital soft skills (Czymoniewicz-Klippel & Cruz, 2023). Students need to be introduced to various digital collaboration tools, for example, Microsoft Teams, Slack or Trello. Seletced References Czymoniewicz-Klippel, M. T., & Cruz, L. E. (2023). Engagement of online biobehavioral health students in ethics education through virtual immersive experiences. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 9(3), 182-192. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/23733799231158384 García-Pérez, R., Santos-Delgado, J. M., & Buzón-García, O. (2016). Virtual empathy as digital competence in education 3.0. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 13, 1-10.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-016-0029-7
Participants in this workshop will be encouraged to share ways that they have transformed their online courses on platforms such as Avenue from cookie-cutter versions to something more personalised, more engaging, and more accessible.
The facilitators, who between them have 20 years of experience in blended and online environments, will share some ways that they themselves have made their online courses more user-friendly for the learners, while focusing on the goal of quality teaching and learning within online spaces. They will first briefly discuss the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.), which suggests that successful teaching in online spaces requires a teaching, social and cognitive presence, sharing how online courses can be transformed by creating these presences.
They will then briefly look at selected aspects of the Avenue Instructor Standards for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning and demonstrate how the standards can validate instructors’ current practices while guiding them towards innovation in their online or blended courses — to move beyond our current practices and the way we’ve always done things; to think about instructional design and to try some tested tools and resources in new ways.
Attendees will participate in two short breakout groups to discuss how they create presence in their online classes, to share their experiences in how they have been creative and transformed their own courses, and then report back to all attendees. The facilitators will collect these ideas, organize them, and share them with the participants, who will leave with concrete and creative ideas for disrupting their own educational practices, moving past the way they may have always done things, and using their own and others’ experiences to transform online learning spaces.
We are no doubt at a crossroads within the field of EAL. With rapidly changing social policy, technological advances, and political tides turning, how do we manage the hopes and anxieties of our students as well as ourselves in the classroom? Is there a way to harness education to enact true change given these tumultuous times? How do we disrupt the present from the past to create a more socially just future? The Black poet and activist Langston Hughes tells us “to hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” As educators, we cannot let go of our dreams of a better future. More importantly, we can collectively dream with our students as a powerful way to resist oppression. As Garcia & Mirra (2023) write, educators and students can “engage in joyful social dreaming to confront injustice.” This workshop will introduce two learning theories to practically bring the dreams of our students into our teaching: futures literacy and speculative pedagogy. Miller (2018) defines futures literacy as the “acquired…skills needed to decide why and how to use… imagination to introduce the non-existent future into the present.” Futures literacy is used globally across disciplines, contexts, andpopulations to enact social change. We will discuss the three tenants of futures literacy and how they fit practically into our instruction: 1) Using the Future to Rethink the Present 2) Fostering Diverse Futures 3) Agency and Empowerment (UNESCO, n.d.). Bringing ideas of futures literacy into education specifically, we will discuss the techniques of speculative pedagogy, which entails students imagine the yet-to-come—a different present that what currently exists (Garcia & Mirra, 2023). Speculative pedagogy enacts futures literacy in the classroom through three techniques (Garcia & Mirra, 2023): a)Decentering the global and (re)emphasizing local, historical, and culturally relevant relationships b)“Iterative, practice-based” learning (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) c)Use of the imagination to enact social change We will look at relevant examples of how speculative pedagogy can be brought into the EAL classroom and what educators need to consider when introducing futures literacy and speculative pedagogy into their practice. Plenty of time will be given to participants to engage in creative discussion and lesson planning. Through exploration of both speculative pedagogy and futures literacy, workshop participants will walk away with inspirational techniques to explore and enact collective dreams for a better future for our students, ourselves, the Land, and community. References Garcia, A. & Mirra, N. (2023). “Always a war story”: Speculative pedagogies and breaking the narrative of multicultural education possibilities. In A. Garcia & N. Mirra (Eds.) Speculative Pedagogy: Designing equitable educational futures (pp. 1-8). Teachers College Press. Hughes, L. (1995). The voice of Langston Huges [Album]. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Miller, R. (2018). Futures literacy: transforming the future. In R. Miller (Ed.) Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century (pp. 1-12). Taylor & Francis. UNESCO. (n.d.) Futures literacy & Foresight. https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy
Instructor / Student, Simon Fraser University / Vancouver Community College
Jennifer Cummins is an EAL educator with almost two decades of experience. She is a doctoral student at SFU in the Languages, Cultures, and Literacies department.
This presentation details our experience at Simon Fraser University (SFU) piloting the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts (PAITE), developed by Dr. Tracie Addy and colleagues. Recognizing the importance of inclusive teaching in supporting our increasingly diverse student population, we sought a concrete tool to help instructors implement and refine inclusive practices. This work directly aligns with SFU’s Academic Plan, which emphasizes the importance of “inclusive excellence and access” where everyone can thrive (SFU, n.d.). As noted in the literature, diverse student groups, including but not limited to students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, first-generation students, and multilingual students, often experience a decreased sense of belonging, which can negatively impact academic success (Strayhorn, 2018; Vaccaro et al., 2015). Further, many instructors express a desire to teach more inclusively, but struggle with lack of training, time constraints, and uncertainty about best practices (Addy et al., 2021). The PAITE protocol offers a structured, evidence-based approach to address this by providing formative, data-informed feedback on observable inclusive teaching practices.
We begin by briefly introducing the protocol, drawing on Addy et al. (2022). We then describe our team's experience becoming PAITE observers. The core of our presentation focuses on the pilot implementation of PAITE with a small cohort of SFU faculty. We will describe our recruitment process, the observation and debriefing procedures, and examples of personalized feedback provided to participating instructors. We will share anonymized examples of observed teaching practices and discuss how the PAITE framework helped to identify both strengths and areas for growth. Initial reflections, gathered through post-observation debriefs, suggest that the PAITE process has been well-received by participating faculty and has prompted meaningful reflection on their teaching practices. Our presentation will conclude by discussing the challenges and successes of the pilot project and outlining our plans for expanding the use of PAITE at SFU.
References: Addy, T. M., Reeves, P. M., Dube, D., & Mitchell, K. A. (2021). What really matters for instructors implementing equitable and inclusive teaching approaches. To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, 40(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.182 Addy, T. M., Younas, H., Cetin, P., Rizk, M., Cham, F., Nwankpa, C., & Borzone, M. (2022). The development of the protocol for advancing inclusive teaching efforts (PAITE). Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 12(0), 65–93. https://doi.org/10.5590/JERAP.2022.12.0.05 Simon Fraser University. (n.d.). Academic plans. Office of the Vice-President, Academic. https://www.sfu.ca/vpacademic/our-role/academic-planning/academic-plans.html Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students' sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students. Routledge. Vaccaro, A., Daly-Cano, M., & Newman, B. M. (2015). A sense of belonging among college students with disabilities: An emergent theoretical model. Journal of College Student Development, 56(7), 670-686.
As an EAL Consultant at SFU’s Centre for Educational Excellence, I collaborate with and provide specialized guidance to faculty in designing linguistically-responsive curricula and teaching methodologies.
I’m an EAL Consultant at SFU’s Centre for Educational Excellence, where we work with a flexible, evidence-based lens to facilitate inclusive teaching support for everyone.