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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.