Today@Dal

Focus on University Teaching and Learning - Graduate Student Edition

"Growing Into Our Own Skin: Personal Development in Higher Education"

Every day we learn more about ourselves – what we enjoy, our aspirations, new hobbies, and especially how we teach. Self-growth is important not only because our teaching environments are ever-changing and filled with new technologies and their accompanying challenges, but also because there is always room for improvement in teaching and within ourselves. As educators, we want to be able to provide our best selves for our students in order to ensure the most effective learning environment. Throughout our journey in education, as with any profession, we learn the challenges that are faced, as well as “tricks of the trade” that should be identified and embraced in order to better ourselves and our teaching effectiveness. Identifying achievements in our own development can provide the foundation for inspiring our students to follow their own path of self-discovery.

This issue of Focus is themed around our own development and how this impacts our profession, teaching and student learning. Pieces for this issues may be on (but are not limited to):

- Discovering Yourself in Academia and within Your Discipline: Identifying and Aspiring -Toward Your Growth (Personal and Professional)
- Growth and Development of a Graduate Student: Experiences, Stories, Successes, and Lessons Learned
- Growth and Development as an Educator: How our approaches to learning and teaching develop and evolve
- Contagious Growth: Inspiring Personal Development in Students (Strategies, Examples, Impacts)

Submissions to Focus are no longer than 1,000 words, and can be a combination of research papers, literature reviews, reflections, casestudies, art work, etc. The deadline for submitting proposals is April 21st, 2017, and should be emailed to Jacob Fletcher, Graduate Teaching Associate at the Centre for Learning and Teaching (Jacob.Fletcher@dal.ca).