We have many excellent educators here at Emily Carr, and I always enjoy opportunities to share in people's successes and learn from their examples. But because we have had so little support for pedagogical development here, sometimes I feel like these workshops become a kind of echo chamber. Many of the practices we hear about are anecdotal and personal experience rather than on the best practices outlined in the (extensive) scholarship into learning and teaching practices.
I know we have had mixed success with bringing in outside workshop leaders, but we have excellent resources in BC with some of the members of the BC Teaching and Learning Council. It would be great to connect in with these colleagues to see whether there are ideas for workshops that could be offered here.
It would also be great to see something about creating a culture of scholarship around teaching and learning here at Emily Carr. Encouraging our faculty to conduct research on their own teaching practices would be one way to both encourage reflective practice (which the research tells us benefits teaching) and identify some much needed best practices in art and design teaching (a very understudied area in the scholarship of teaching and learning).