Notice Board

Due to the weather, our speakers are not able to attend. This event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Speakers: Lee Easton, Roberta Lexier, Gabrielle Lindstrom, Michelle Yeo.

As explored in the 2016 SoTL Symposium, “Decoding the disciplines” is a process developed by Middendorf and Pace (2004) to help university teachers deal with bottlenecks – disciplinary concepts we understand implicitly but have a difficult time explaining to students. In this model, a key step is a decoding interview, whereby interviewers help teachers unpack crucial mental operations and the origins of their own knowledge (p. 6).

While decoding the disciplines offers important insights, the approach is strongly cognitivist (Yeo, 2017, p. 49). While “finding” the moment of learning (now forgotten) and rendering the “ah ha!” moment visible can indeed make for better teaching, lost in the moment of improvement is the more difficult critical question of complicit knowledge, that which has functioned to reproduce settler-colonial knowledge.

Battiste, Bell, and Findlay (2002) note that decolonization within the academy, “requires multilateral processes of understanding and unpacking the central assumptions of domination, patriarchy, racism, and ethnocentrisms that continue to glue the academy's privileges in place” (p. 84).  We will share how we’re exploring an adapted decoding process to discover a different sort of blind spot: tacit colonial structures within faculty member’s discipline in order to work toward a decolonized curriculum and emphasize the potential for continuous growth in those moments of disruption which illuminates a clearer path towards an ethical space (Ermine, 2007).

Lee Easton is an associate professor at Mount Royal University. His work with Kelly Hewson in the scholarship of teaching and learning has focused on how Canadian identities operate in film studies classrooms. He also published with Richard Harrison Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and Superhero. Most recently, his interests are in decolonization, identities and currently.  He holds appointments in both the Department of General Education and the Department of English, Languages and Culture.

Roberta Lexier is an Associate Professor in the Department of General Education at Mount Royal University. Her research and teaching focus on social movements, social activism, and social change. She trained as a historian and studies student movements, feminism and women’s movements, Indigenous movements, economic movements, environmental movements, and the counterculture. She has published on Sixties student movements in English Canada and the intersections between social movements and political parties, especially the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP). In addition, she is working on ways to understand and resist the ways her discipline remains complicit in colonialism through a collaborative project.

Dr. Gabrielle Lindstrom (nee Weasel Head), a member of the Kainaiwa First Nation in Southern Alberta, is an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies with the Department of Humanities with Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta. Her dissertation research focused on the interplay between trauma and resilience in the post-secondary experiences of Aboriginal adult learner in order to understand a unique perspective on Indigenous resilience that originates from traumas.  Other research interests include meaningful assessment in higher education, parenting assessment tools reform in Child Welfare, Indigenous homelessness and housing policy, Indigenous research protocols and praxis, and anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogy.

Dr. Michelle Yeo is an associate professor and the Academic Director of the Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University. She has a B.Ed, M.A. and PhD in Education. Michelle has worked for the past decade in the Academic Development Centre as a faculty development consultant with an emphasis in curriculum. She conducts SoTL research in classroom pedagogy, student experience, assessment, and more recently, decolonizing practices in the institution.