The flourishing of care in a multidisciplinary Faculty Learning Community

ABSTRACT

In a multidisciplinary Faculty Learning Community focussed on exploring threshold concepts and bottlenecks in learning, care emerged as an unanticipated dimension to our work, transforming the ways we view teaching, learning, our disciplines, and educational development. In this piece, we reflect on the types of care that emerged and consider implications for educational development.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• Faculty Learning Community
• threshold concept
• Decoding the Disciplines
• educational development

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge our colleague Shannon Dea for her intellectual and emotional generosity as a member of our Faculty Learning Community. As a colleague and teacher, Shannon embodies care in its many forms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This journal was founded by Milton Cox, to whom the idea of Faculty Learning Communities is attributed. A query of the journal’s archives searches all article titles, authors, and abstracts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie A. Timmermans

Julie A. Timmermans is Senior Lecturer in the Higher Education Development Centre, University of Otago. Through teaching, research, and educational development work at different institutions in various countries, she has noticed that people are often deeply moved and grateful when they feel cared for in an academic context.

Carmen Bruni

Carmen Bruni is a lecturer in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Carmen’s passion for computer science and mathematics has been contagious amongst his students and his teaching style reflects his caring personality.

Rob Gorbet

Rob Gorbet is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo. Rob cares deeply about his communities, his students, and their success. He preaches and teaches about the importance of empathy in successful group work: in order to work well together, we need to care – about the product, about the process, and ideally about each other.

Barbara Moffatt

Barbara Moffatt is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo. She has enjoyed a lengthy career enthralled by doing research in plant molecular genetics and sharing both her passion and care for the discipline in teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Gordon Stubley

Gordon Stubley is a Professor of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo where he has taught engineering fluid mechanics and computer simulation at all levels. His care for his discipline and students is most evident in the support he provides his colleagues as Associate Dean, Teaching.

Diane Williams

Diane Williams is a Continuing Lecturer and Associate Director, Undergraduate Studies, in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo. She cares deeply about teaching and mentoring students and encourages them to be skeptical inquirers about information on human health and disease.

Trevor Holmes

Trevor Holmes is Senior Instructional Developer, Research and Faculty Programs at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence. He completes a Teaching Perspectives Inventory annually, and comes up Nurturing and Social Justice every time. He cares about teachers and learners, as well as about the historical and future roles of universities.