Getting Started in SoTL Series

This four-session series offers an engaging introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and serves as a gateway into our faculty learning community. Meeting bi-weekly through the fall, participants will explore key readings and join guided discussions that build a shared understanding of SoTL—its core concepts, methods, sources of evidence, and the unique ethical considerations that shape this field of scholarly inquiry.

• What is Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and how does it connect to Disciplinary Educational Research and Educational
• Research more broadly? (Nov 6, 2025. 10-11am)
• What research questions and methodologies are utilized? (Dec 5, 2025. 1-2pm)
• What is the range of possibilities for sources of data? (Jan 8, 2026. 2-3pm)
• What are the particular ethical dimensions of SoTL to consider? (Feb 4, 2026. 1-2pm)
• How can we work in partnership with students in SoTL? (March 4, 2026. 10-11 am)
• What networks exist to support the development of SoTL scholars? (April 10, 2026. 12-1pm)

We invite participants and alumni of the Mokakiiks SoTL Development Program to join our SoTL Community of Practice—a collegial network designed to sustain learning, collaboration, and mentorship beyond the program itself. A community of practice model is powerful because it brings together individuals who share a commitment to advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning, creating a space for ongoing dialogue, peer support, and the exchange of ideas. By connecting with colleagues who are actively engaged in SoTL research and practice, members can deepen their expertise, share resources, and collectively cultivate innovative approaches to enhancing student learning. For more information, please contact Cherie Woolmer at cwoolmer@mtroyal.ca.

Throughout the year, the Mokakiiks Centre for SoTL hosts on-campus book and journal studies that invite both SoTL-curious and SoTL-confident faculty and students to engage in shared exploration of key works in the field. These informal yet scholarly gatherings create space to read and discuss influential SoTL publications, exchange perspectives, and consider how emerging research can inform and enrich teaching and learning practice and inform future SoTL studies on campus. Details about upcoming book studies and journal clubs are shared throughout the academic year, offering opportunities for faculty and students to connect, reflect, and deepen their engagement with SoTL scholarship.

Programming

Yeo, Miller-Young, & Manarin. (2023). SoTL Research Methodologies: A guide to conceptualizing and conducting the scholarship of teaching and learning. Routledge.

Experienced faculty who enter the field of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) often encounter research approaches that feel new or unfamiliar compared to their home discipline. Making a choice to use new methodologies in your SoTL work can be exciting but also daunting. SoTL Research Methodologies: A guide to conceptualizing and conducting the scholarship of teaching and learning (2023) provides a comprehensive framework for constructing SoTL studies, analyzing data, and sharing research outcomes. Participants will have the opportunity to bring questions and share approaches used in their own SoTL work. Those new and experienced in SoTL are welcome to join.

Register here (Online or in person participation)
Facilitator: Cherie Woolmer
Dates: 12-1pm, Oct 2, 23, November 13, December 4, 18, 2025.

Brave Conversations in SoTL is a collaborative speakers’ series that brings together an international slate of scholars to discuss ideas around critical approaches to themes of epistemic justice, students as knowers, and threshold experiences in higher education. The series is in collaboration with the University of Calgary's Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.

Season Three of Brave Conversations In SoTL explores the many ways that risk can be understood, taken up, and experienced by those engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

Risk-taking is often framed in celebratory terms — entrepreneurial, innovative, bold. While this can be a positive rendering, we want to trouble that familiar narrative. What might open up if we invited our community to think about risk in more pluralistic, more nuanced ways? How might our understanding of risk-taking, innovation, and failure in SoTL change when we look through an intersectional lens? What if we centred the lived experiences of those for whom “taking a risk” is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but something that carries real professional, personal, or emotional stakes?

Season 3, Session 1: The Ethics of Care in SoTL: Exploring Care, Support, and Compassion in SoTL

Panelists: Dr. Brittany Lindsay, J Overholser, Dr. Lisa Taylor
Date & Time: March 23, 2026 (9:00 AM MST)

This panel will examine how we can support ourselves and each other and build communities that sustain rather than deplete those doing brave SoTL work. This conversation foregrounds the ethical, relational, and emotional dimensions of SoTL and considers how an ethic of care might act as both a buffer and a catalyst for risk-taking.

Register now to receive the Zoom link for this online session!

Season 3, Session 2: What happens when we fail?

Panelists: Dr. Natasha Kenny, Dr. Jen Bowman, Dr. Alyssa Counsell
Date and Time: April 20, 2026 (10:00 AM MST)

If taking risks assumes the possibility of failure, how do we respond when things don’t work? How might we create institutional climates that embrace failure as a necessary part of advancing teaching and learning? In what ways does failure connect back to care — care for ourselves, care for our colleagues, care for our students? This session explores failure not as an endpoint but as an essential part of the creative and intellectual process, asking what it would take to normalize and even value failure within our SoTL ecosystems.

Register now to receive the Zoom link for this online session!

To watch previous seasons of Brave Conversations, visit our YouTube playlist using the link below.