How do we become creative people in the world, as both instructors and learners? For Dr. Laleh Behjat, professor of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School, creativity both necessitates and fosters courageous, caring, and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. In our conversation, Dr. Behjat shares how she and her colleagues renewed the engineering curricula during COVID-19, and offers examples of how she cultivates community in her classrooms. Join us as Dr. Behjat describes how we might eliminate exams and draw inspiration from karate to reimagine “cheating” as a form of collaboration. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.  

Over the course of a twenty-five-year teaching career, Dr. Jesse Stommel has been interrogating the power dynamics that structure our grading and assessment practices. Every conversation about grades is also a conversation about power, he maintains, and “ungrading” might offer some possibilities for making our classrooms more inclusive, caring, and collaborative spaces. The rapid switch to online teaching during COVID-19 raised some new questions for Dr. Stommel about the state of post-secondary education, and he found himself reconsidering the very foundations of his teaching and learning practice. Join us as Dr. Stommel discusses the joys of collaboration and the problem with “pivots,” and shares some strategies for how we might reimagine grading and assessment. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.  

“3QTL: Three Questions About Teaching and Learning” is a podcast focused on innovative approaches to teaching and learning in higher education. In its first season, the podcast invites post-secondary faculty across disciplines to share their experiences during COVID-19. Our guests and host, Dr. Derritt Mason, discuss how the pandemic affected their teaching philosophy, what best supported or hindered their practice during that period, and what they learned that they would keep doing in the future.