Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching

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https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/100015
The Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching offers an opportunity for academic staff, students, academic librarians and staff at the University of Calgary and the wider academic community to share, critically examine and build on our collective knowledge of teaching and learning.

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Browsing Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching by Department "English"

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    Earn your Shakespeare Badge
    (2015-05-12) Ullyot, Michael; Kenney, Theresa; Wu, Leanne; Beaulieu, Braydon
    There are multiple outlets for students’ creative and critical engagement in our introductory course on Shakespeare, each linked to an explicit learning outcome: annotating texts, live-tweeting classes, reviewing performances, blogging sonnets. Like others at our institution (Kim: 2014), we are implementing a micro-credentialling system of digital badges to reward this engagement. Our goal is to gamify participation with a system of recognition that would be responsive to student initiative. We give students multiple options under each of our ten badges. For instance, the Genres and Modes Badge invites them to signify genres by designing movie posters; or to capture the arbitrariness of outcomes through a text-adventure video game. (“If Romeo commits suicide, click here; if he hesitates long enough for Juliet to wake up, click here.”) Digital badges recognize students’ skills that extend beyond a particular course into new environments: analyzing texts is a skill for other courses, and for the workplace (Alliance: 2013). They also recognize peer achievement and build a class community (Ferdig and Pytash: 2014).
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    Incorporating Archival Practices into the Undergraduate Classroom
    (2015-05-12) Wiens, Jason
    My poster takes as a case study a new senior undergraduate course I designed in conjunction with members of the Taylor Family Digital Library. This course asks students to examine archival sources alongside published literary texts, and to engage in a digitization project of selections from the archival fonds of various Canadian authors. The general goal of the course – entitled “Reading in the Canadian Archive” and currently underway in winter semester – is to bring to the classroom an awareness of the material conditions under which literature is produced. This course asks undergraduate students to not only integrate archival records in literary analysis but to contribute to the archive by institutional digitization projects based on their course readings. “Reading in the Canadian Archive” asks students to imagine “how to pursue scholarship into a future that will be organized in a digital horizon and how to integrate our paper inheritance in that new framework” (McGann 185). As the course offers a brief intervention into the practice of archiving itself, students come to recognize that such archival practices “are constantly evolving, ever mutating as they reflect changes in the nature of records, record-creating organizations, record-keeping systems, record uses, and the wider cultural, legal, technological, social, and philosophical trends in society” (Cook 29). My poster considers how close analysis of archival records might lead to increased undergraduate engagement with literary texts.