Connect, Collaborate, and Contribute — Join the Conversation Shaping SoTL in Calgary!

Bridging the Bow: Connecting Calgary’s SoTL Communities.
May 29th, 2026, 9:00 am–4:30 pm

Join us on May 29th, 2026, for a dynamic day of connection and collaboration at Bridging the Bow: Connecting Calgary's SoTL Communities, bringing together Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) communities from Mount Royal University, SAIT, and the University of Calgary.

This professional development event, co-hosted by MRU's Mokakiiks Centre for SoTL, SAIT’s Teaching and Learning Commons, and UCalgary’s Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, features interactive workshops, panel discussions, writing sessions, and a networking lunch—all designed to support your SoTL practice and spark meaningful cross-institutional collaborations.

Whether you are SoTL curious, advancing a project, seeking feedback, or looking to grow and nurture your SoTL network, this event offers a unique opportunity to engage with peers, exchange ideas, and build the relationships that sustain impactful teaching and learning scholarship. Educators, researchers, and SoTL practitioners will share insights, explore collaborative opportunities, and strengthen our collective SoTL community.

Spring SoTL Sprint

The Mokakiiks Centre for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning invites you to register today for the Spring SoTL Sprint: A Two-Day Intensive for MRU Faculty—an energizing, immersive off-campus professional development experience designed to help you take your first steps—or next steps—into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

📍 Location: CSpace Marda Loop – Treehouse Board Room
📅 Dates: June 8–9, 2026, (9:30 am - 4:00 pm)
🔗 Register: https://mtroyaladc.libcal.com/event/4021154

The Mokakiiks Spring SoTL Sprint is an immersive, off-campus retreat designed for MRU faculty (full-time and contract) who are ready to start, revisit, or deepen their engagement with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Whether you have not yet completed the development program, or you are a scholar looking to enhance and extend your SOTL practice, this sprint offers a unique opportunity to move your work forward—quickly, meaningfully, and in community.

This is not just another PD workshop—it’s a dedicated, off-campus retreat for your thinking, your writing, and your growth as a SoTL scholar. Earn a certificate in SoTL foundations while jump-starting your own research, deepening your understanding of methodologies, data collection, and students-as-partners approaches, and immersing yourself in a vibrant SoTL community— all while enjoying meaningful conversation and connection with colleagues from across campus over shared lunches and coffee in the beautiful CSpace setting.

Over two days, you will:

• Clarify and strengthen your SoTL ideas—from early curiosities to emerging research questions
• Build methodological confidence, exploring approaches to inquiry, data collection, and analysis
• Work alongside colleagues in a supportive, interdisciplinary community of practice
• Engage with experienced SoTL scholars and student partners through panels and interactive sessions
• Make meaningful progress on proposals, projects, or publications
• Position your work strategically, including integrating SoTL into your narrative CV and future funding pathways

Hosted in the inspiring Treehouse Boardroom at cSPACE King Edward, this experience is intentionally designed as both a structured learning pathway and a creative retreat. You will step away from daily demands and into a collaborative space where ideas take shape, projects gain traction, and SoTL becomes something you actively do, not just something you plan.

What to Expect at the Spring SoTL Sprint

Across the two days, you’ll move through a thoughtfully designed sequence of sessions that blend learning, doing, and connecting:

• Foundations of SoTL and research design
• Approaches to data collection and analysis
• Students as partners in inquiry
• Writing and project development time
• Knowledge mobilization and building your SoTL network
• Action learning sets and peer feedback
• Practical next steps for funding, dissemination, and engagement

Earn a Certificate in SoTL Foundations, and get recognized for your professional development work!

Participants who complete the Spring SoTL Sprint will receive a Certificate of Completion (SoTL Foundations Program) from the Mokakiiks Centre SoTL, recognizing your commitment to advancing your scholarly practice in teaching and learning.

Who Should Attend?

The Spring SoTL Sprint is designed for:

• Faculty new to SoTL and looking for a strong, supported entry point
• Faculty already engaged in SoTL who want to deepen or extend their work
• Anyone ready to invest dedicated time in their scholarly teaching practice

Join Us - Register today!

This is an opportunity to step into a community, a conversation, and a practice that is shaping teaching and learning at MRU and beyond. Spots are full, but you can still join the waitlist.

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)

Register for the Getting Started In SoTL Workshop Series here.
Facilitator: Cherie Woolmer

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.

Watch on YouTube

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

Panelists: Dr. Natasha Kenny, Dr. Jennifer Boman, 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.

Watch on YouTube

Season 3, Session 3: Revisiting and Rethinking "Risk" in SoTL

Panelists: Dr. Peter Felten (Centre for Engaged Learning, Elon University), Dr. Naureen Mumtaz (Mount Royal University) and J Overholser (University of Calgary) (Facilitated by Dr. Cherie Woolmer)
Date and Time: May 7, 2026 (9:30 AM MST)

In what ways can we think about risk beyond the usual language of innovation and courage?

How might risk intersect with ideas of failure, vulnerability, or uncertainty? Can some colleagues or students take greater risks than others? Who is afforded safety, protection, or grace — and who is not? What emerges when we take an intersectional lens to the people who engage in SoTL? Reflecting on issues raised in previous sessions, our speakers will invite participants to interrogate the uneven terrain of risk and examine how positionality shapes what is possible — and what is not — within SoTL inquiry.

Watch on YouTube

 

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

What is Students as Partners?

At Mount Royal University, we believe that the best teaching and learning happens with students. Rather than a traditional mentoring or assistant role, student partners bring their lived experience of learning into dialogue with faculty expertise in teaching. Together, they explore how to make learning more engaging, inclusive, and effective.

Research across higher education shows that partnership programs lead to measurable improvements in both teaching and learning and provide a transformative experiential learning opportunity for students. Faculty who work with student partners report more reflective, responsive teaching and a renewed sense of purpose in their classrooms. Students involved in partnerships describe greater confidence, deeper engagement with their studies, and a stronger sense of belonging within the academic community. At an undergraduate-focused university, these benefits are even more profound. Every student has the potential to become a contributor to teaching and learning innovation. Through partnerships, students move from being recipients of knowledge to active participants in shaping how learning happens and how it can be improved.

Read more about the Students as Partners project, led by CRC SoTL Scholar Dr. Cherie Woolmer.