Leadership in the Professional Role – Brenna Clarke Gray’s Portfolio for Tenure and Promotion

Here I list the criteria from 2.4.2(b) in the Learning Design and Innovation Department Promotion and Tenure Standards document and list the aligned activities that I see as achieving these criteria. List (b) refers to demonstrated leadership in the professional role.

While the criteria listed in the Department Promotion and Tenure Standards document are not meant to be a checklist, I have accomplished something of note in each area, with the exception of the item, “Significant external leadership roles with educational agencies and organizations.” I look forward to this as a growth opportunity for my post-tenure career, to seek such leadership opportunities as I grow in the role.

In applying for tenure, I must show that I have achieved “satisfactory performance,” which for list (b) demands that my work be “recognized and assessed at a local / regional level.” To that end, “a bipartite candidate for tenure will normally provide evidence of four to six significant activities applicable to Lists 2.4.2(b) and/or 2.4.2(c) on leadership and/or scholarship in the professional role area.” Therefore, I have highlighted in pink those items that I would like to have considered in my application for tenure.

In applying for promotion to Instructional Support II, I must show that I have achieved “superior performance,” which for list (b) demands that my work be “recognized and assessed at a national level.” To that end, “a candidate for Instructional Support II will have an on-going record over the career to date that normally provides evidence of six to eight significant activities in the areas of leadership and/or scholarship in the professional role area.” Therefore, I have highlighted in blue those items that I would like to have considered in my application for promotion to Instructional Support II.

The only exception to this highlighting key is in areas where I would like the aligned activity to the criteria to be considered for both tenure and promotion, ie. where a list of conference presentations and talks includes both regional and national / international audiences. In these cases, I have highlighted the activity in yellow and used the following key: regional items are marked with a * and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for tenure; national (and international) presentations are marked with a ^ and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for promotion. I have highlighted five items.

For the most part, in the sections below I have tried not to duplicate activities already listed in 2.4.2(a); while duplicating materials across these sections is not disallowed by the Standards Document, I have had a wildly productive three years, and I seek here to capture the range and breadth of my contributions. I acknowledge and celebrate that many of the activities in 2.4.2(a) also involve leadership and scholarship, but the distinction I draw is that I see the majority the below sections as over and above the day-to-day support work of the learning technologist in attending to the technology needs of campus.

Professional role outreach making specialized knowledge more broadly accessible
and usable to university faculty and learners in other disciplines and the community
through public workshops, lectures seminars, etc.

Public Workshops

Regional sessions are marked with a * and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for tenure. National and international sessions are marked with a ^ and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for promotion.

^Continuity of Care Webinar (13 March 2020): Just before campus shutdown happened, I was invited to join a global conversation about how to enact care for students during the impending pandemic closures.
*BCCampus Session, “Reducing Student Stress: Tips and Tricks to Learning Online” (6 May 2020): I was invited by BCCampus to co-facilitate this student-centered session on remote learning. There were 54 people in attendance.
*BCcampus Community Building Series, “In It Together: Building Community and Enacting Care in Online Environments” (July/August 2020): This series of workshops, co-organized with Ian Linkletter, offered faculty an opportunity to learn about pedagogies of care and equity practice in a pandemic contexts. This workshop series was the second most-watched webinar BCcampus offered during the pandemic.
*ETUG Talk, “Care in Crisis: A Crisis of Care” (4 December 2020): This session was invited based on my submission to the ETUG Fall conference, but the organizers felt it would be better as an open session separate from the conference. In the session, I discussed and demonstrated the importance of centring ethic of care thinking in our approach to pandemic teaching and learning.
^Guest Office Hours for Rebus Foundation (15 March 2022): I was invited to sit in on the Rebus Foundation office hours to talk about student-centred design in OER development.

Invited Talks

Regional talks are marked with a * and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for tenure. National and international talks are marked with a ^ and should be considered in the evaluation of this application for promotion.

*Guest Lecture at SFU Harbour Centre (10 March 2020): I was asked by Hannah McGregor to talk to her PUB 401: Technology and the Evolving Book class about memes and GIFs as a form of digital publishing, including the history of their use as the vernacular of the internet, and to provide a hands-on workshop to teach students how to create memes and GIFs themselves.
*Reflective Workshop, CETABC (29 September 2021): The Continuing Education and Training Association of BC invited me to run the reflective workshop I created for TRU and presented at ETUG in 2021 [D.4.13].
*H5P PB Kitchen, “Sampling the Projects” (26 November 2020): I was invited to share the work our team did on our H5P Pressbooks project to improve the Writing for Success textbook for first-year English classes.
*UBC Symposium on H5P (22 February 2022): I was invited to present my work creating H5P objects for writing instruction, and particularly to demonstrate my use of the documentation tool.
^Guest Lecture, Bowling Green State University (18 April 2022): I was invited to join a third-year English class at BGSU to talk about podcasting and young adult culture, based on my podcast, “Hazel&Katniss&Harry&Starr.”
^MYFest22 Open Learning Journey: “Feminist Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Bricolage” (10 June 2022): Some of the contributors to the Feminist Critical Digital Pedagogy collection were invited to read aloud from their work at this event. We were also able to talk about the process of an open peer review process.
^MYFest 22 “Ethical EdTech: The Questions We Should Ask and the Answers We Deserve” (14 July 2022): This session, co-presented with Anne-Marie Scott, explored the ways all institutional community members can involve themselves in the procurement and use of ethical educational technologies.

Podcast Interviews

Secret Feminist Agenda, “Baby Noises and Decoding Toxic Masculinity with Brenna Clarke Gray” (15 September 2017): Hannah MacGregor invited me on her podcast to talk about the space (or lack thereof) for motherhood within the academy.
Gettin’ Air Podcast (23 April 2020): Terry Greene invited me to talk about my work and the pandemic on his podcast that focuses on open and technology-enabled teaching and learning practice in post-secondary education.
Praxis Pedagogy Podcast (11 June 2020): Tim Carson invited me to talk about my work and the pandemic on his teaching and learning-centered podcast that he makes from a trades perspective.
Between the Chapters: The LMS (7 Jan 2021): In this partner podcast to the serialized audiobook version of Martin Weller’s 25 Years of EdTech (for which I got to read the chapter on Learning Analytics!), a group of educators discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly about the LMS.
Praxis Pedagogy Podcast (24 February 2021): Tim Carson invited me back on the show, this time to talk about the state of the university and the value of care in remote learning contexts and after.
Gender, Sex and Tech Podcast with Jill Fellows (11 January 2022): Jill interviewed me about podcasting as feminist scholarly practice for a companion podcast she is releasing alongside a book project.
Open Pedagogy Podcast with Tim Carson (13 June 2022): I was interviewed by Tim for a new podcast project he is undertaking that explains open pedagogy principles to people working in applied fields, primarily in the trades.
Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective Podcast with Charles Woods (16 June 2022): I was asked to sit on this podcast panel to discuss data privacy, surveillance, and the concerns many in open education have about the encroachment of Course Hero in institutional spaces.
Teacher of the Ear Podcast with Chris Friend (27 June 2022): I was interviewed by Chris Friend about hope in education in hopeless times, based on a conversation I started on Season 2, Episode 29 of You Got This! about the difference between hope and optimism.

Improving teaching and learning within a discipline or across disciplines through the development or redevelopment of course or support materials.

Routledge Introduction to Canadian Comics

I am currently under contract (submission date 31 January 2024) to write the first-ever textbook in Canadian comics, with the intention of targeting second- and third-year undergraduates [D.4.14]. This project brings together my academic background in Canadian comics and also my current role in pedagogical support to offer not only a thematic survey of the discipline but also both reading and writing support. Reading comics and writing about comics are academic skills with specific cognitive demands (eg. the attending to of two registers, the visual and the verbal, at once), and yet students often feel unsupported in creating arguments about the texts they read. These sections of the text are intended to also be released as Open Access hyperlinked readers. Further, to coincide with the book’s release, I will produce a four-episode podcast series on teaching Canadian comics.

This project emerges from a previous project I developed in 2018 in collaboration with the journal Canadian Literature, which was an Open Access guide to comics and Canadian literature. I know that this guide has had some life in Canadian universities, including at the University of Saskatchewan as assigned reading in the Winter 2020 sections of ENGL 113 and ENGL 382.

Hazel&Katniss&Harry&Starr

The first weekly podcast I co-created is a project with Joe Lipsett (an educational developer at Western University with a background in film studies) called Hazel&Katniss&Harry&Starr (or, to fans, HKHSPod). In production since 2017, we have to date recorded four fifty-episode seasons and 206 total episodes of analysis about young adult literature and film adaptation. We average just under 700 listeners per week. Joe produces the episodes and we share a scholarly approach to pop culture criticism. In her letter of support for this application [see D.8.5], Hannah McGregor writes,

Brenna’s podcasting work is exemplary of the way podcasting can be taken up as a medium for publicly engaged scholarship, public pedagogy, and community building. Her first foray into podcasting was her long-running show Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr, a young adult literature and film podcast that boasts over 200 episodes (and counting!). On this podcast, Brenna models her typical approach to public scholarship, crafting a scholarly voice that is both warmly engaging and deeply rigorous, while embracing the affordances of new media to reach wider audiences. Reviewers describe it as striking “a beautiful chord between celebration, critical thinking, thoughtful interrogation, and in some cases nostalgia that make this a wildly accessible podcast for anyone interested in YA storytelling” and as creating a great resource for high school teachers that is also accessible to teens.

Making HKHSPod has taught me a lot about public scholarship and about how innovative and engaging forms can reach broader audiences. Our show is also a fun engagement with interdisciplinarity, as Joe and I bring thinkers and theories from our own academic backgrounds to bear on the texts we talk about on the show – paired with a lot of laughter. We know from our reviews that we have teachers and academics who listen and use our materials in the classroom, and in April 2022 I was invited to a young adult literature class at Bowling Green State University to talk specifically about podcasting and making media about teen culture.

Developing new/innovative teaching and learning techniques, resources,
technologies, materials, aids, etc.

H5P Activities for Teaching Composition

I spend a lot of time in workshops and in office hours building H5P capacity at TRU, but one place where I can truly claim to have innovated is with the way I use H5P activities for open-ended courses like composition. Much of this is spotlighted in the information about the BCcampus H5P grant earlier in this document, but my specific area of expertise and capacity building is in creating H5P objects for composition instruction.

H5P objects are small, lightweight, and easy-to-build objects that can be placed in a learning management system or open publishing platform to add interactivity for the user. In a learning context, they are very effective for formative learning tasks: opportunities for students to check their knowledge or self-test in a low-stakes way. H5P is unique in that it builds feedback into the process by design, so instructors are prompted to build very rich activities. Typically, H5P is used most easily for closed-ended-type questions.

With my background in English, I was interested in figuring out a solution for using H5P to do more essay planning and open-ended questions. The main activity I was looking to adopt was my popular thesis development exercise, where I walk students through the steps of answering an essay question and then structuring an essay. I discovered that the Documentation Tool can be effectively re-tooled to serve this purpose. I also discovered that the Multiple Choice tool can be re-tooled to serve as an editing and revising checklist, and I reimagined the Summary and Essay tools – which are not particularly useful for those purposes! – for paragraph ordering (the Summary tool) and précis writing (ironically not the Summary tool, but the Essay tool).

In the organization of an H5P training event that ended up being cancelled due to Covid-19, I met Steel Wagstaff of Pressbooks and showed him these applications; he would eventually invite me to share this work in a conference presentation about creating “living online courses” for OpenEd20. I also advocated with Steel for the need to create what I call “page-one printables” of H5P exercises in Pressbooks for users who must use the print editions of online texts, like rural or incarcerated learners, and thus cannot open the H5P activities. I hope one day that this process will be automated; for now, I show my faculty clients how to create these more accessible static resources for their texts.

I presented an expanded version of this work at OEGlobal in 2021, for which I built a persistent resource that includes downloads of all of the exercises I have developed. I consistently hear from people who have found these resources when searching how to adapt H5P for English courses. I was also invited to present this work at UBC’s H5P symposium in 2022, where it was described by the organizers as an innovative use of the tool.

Significant coordination role.

Covid-19 Pivot to Emergency Remote Teaching

I include a specific section on the transition to remote learning that came with the advent of Covid-19 because it represented a significant increase in my workload and a meaningful shift in the focus of the role. I took the lead in defining the campus support response and also did the lion’s share of the hands-on support and programming (for example, we received 1155 tickets between 15 March and 30 June 2020, and I was the responding tech on 545 of them, or 47%; the next most active tech answered 155, or 12%).

My colleagues agree with this estimation of my leadership role in the pivot, as evidenced from the following quotations from my PRC questionnaire [D.7.3]:

She has taken a leadership role in providing professional development opportunities to faculty from the initial pivot to the present day in the pandemic. In fact, she has taken on far too much of the burden of this work.

From the perspective of a faculty member, Brenna Gray completed high quality work during the COVID pandemic. She brought campus members together (if not F2F, then virtually and in spirit) through her workshops and also her podcast. Beyond her fundamental job requirements, she has shown exceptional leadership and community building on our campus to really make TRU a better place and she inspires others to work towards the same goals. I am so pleased to have her as a colleague.

Brenna’s deep knowledge, critical lens and stellar leadership during the past two years has been evident in a most public way across the institution. The materials, the workshops, and the tone set by Brenna defined our covid teaching response.

I also note that my APAR and PRC responses from this time indicate the significance of my leadership role:

2020 [C.2]: We would be remiss in not recognizing the instrumental role you have played during not only the initial pivot to online this spring but throughout the pandemic and transition to primarily virtual delivery this summer and fall. Of particular significance are the Pivot to Digital website, Support for Virtual Delivery Moodle site and Summer Camp series with ensuing badges. Throughout your promotion of a culture of care during this time has been steadfast and your influence large as reflected in the number of workshop participants and individual and group consultations. Your impact is also evident in your efforts to establish clearer processes for student support. Moreover, your report provides evidence of numerous projects in which you are supporting faculty to use technology in pedagogically appropriate ways across campus. […] We recognize that you have gone above and beyond in your professional role this past year and, in doing so, have provided an invaluable service to the greater university community at a time of great need. […] Thank you again for your contributions this past year. This letter is not capable of capturing the extent of your influence on our university community and beyond during this critical time. Nor are these words capable of truly acknowledging the debt owed.

2021 [C.4]: We cannot emphasize enough the impact of your continued support of faculty, both as they prepared to approach an entire academic year online and then as we all navigated our way through what can only be described as unprecedented times. Throughout, while supporting the use of technologies, you also advocated tirelessly for a pedagogy of care. […] You completed a significant amount of work in pure technical support through the help desk, one-on-one consultations, office hours and classroom support. You also took the lead in developing and executing the learning technology programming for the entire TRU community throughout the pandemic so far. The number of sessions, as well as the attendance at each, testifies to your impact on the TRU community. […] Again, we recognize that you have gone above and beyond in your professional role and service this past year and, in doing so, have provided an invaluable service to the university community and beyond at a time of unprecedented need. […] Thank you again wholeheartedly for your contributions this past year. This letter is not capable of capturing the extent of your influence on our university community and beyond during this critical time. We are confident that you will continue to find ways to make a positive difference and are hopeful that you will find ways to care for yourself as well now that we have a larger team to draw upon.

PRC [D.7.2]: She has had a tremendous impact on the TRU community, leading much of the faculty development programming throughout the pandemic. She supported the initial pivot to online at the start of the pandemic, planned and delivered much of the summer programming in preparation for the full academic year of remote teaching and continued to support faculty in their use of educational technologies as we navigated an uncertain academic year with the return to campus.

I spearheaded the majority of the LT&I response to the pandemic which, given the high-touch technical demands of the campus community in March 2020, represented a significant component of the entire university response. My role included:

Resource development, as articulated elsewhere in this document.
Workshop programming, also as articulated elsewhere in this document.
Organizing office hours support given the fluctuating team and the requirement that all CUPE members, who we relied on for backfill, use their vacation time at the start of the remote work period. In two days between the notification of courses moving to remote learning and the LT&I department shifting to working from home, Jamie Drozda and I held several intensive open sessions for faculty to drop-in and receive support. This gave us a clear sense of the demand level for support and prompted us to develop a schedule of online office hours to maintain a consistent presence for faculty. I took the lead on managing these office hours, ensuring that we had coverage when Jamie was on vacation (thanks to the generosity of the Instructional Design and Production teams) and ensuring coverage was established so I could take vacation. I also trained the Triage Team, as we termed Nicole Singular and Stephanie Gountas. One of the real pleasures during this time was working with Nicole and Stephanie, who need no help from me with their Moodle skills, but who I supported to develop their confidence so they could become effective on-the-fly faculty support. We could not have survived the transition without them, and I am so grateful for their hard work. (It is worth noting, given the high number of personnel hours committed to office hours, that office hours were wildly popular, in no small part due to the consistency of the presence. Office hours between March and June 2020 alone were accessed a total of 3878 times since the initial shift to remote learning, with 104 users accessing office hours in the first iteration of the support shell, and 164 users in the second iteration.
Organizing peer review groups. I was so concerned about pedagogical support for faculty when I took vacation that I organized interested faculty into supported peer review groups. Each group was assigned an Instructional Designer to reach out to if they have any issues, and a handful of feedback resources to use as they reviewed each other’s shells in advance of the Fall 2020 term.
Surveying students and faculty about the experience, but especially students. In the very early days of the pandemic, I sought to determine whether our interventions were making the load on students easier, and so I used EDUCAUSE’s questions to survey them. I then used the data collected to draft an interim report on the pivot and how it had been supported, giving a high-level overview of the commentary as well as a series of recommendations. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first person on campus to undertake this kind of data collection, and the only person to collect the data twice during the remote learning period. This report was circulated to Deans and Directors for their information, and presented to Academic Computing and Technology Advisory Committee, Teaching and Learning Committee of Senate, and Student Success Committee of Senate [D.4.15]. In the absence of any other data collection, I continued the process of soliciting feedback about the online teaching and learning experience. Unlike the spring survey, in this Fall version (for which I received assistance in survey design from Carolyn Hoessler) I only solicited student feedback. I received over 500 responses to the survey and presented the findings – and LT&I’s recommendations for appropriate pedagogical responses from faculty – to the Senate Teaching and Learning Committee and to the Librarian faculty council [D.4.16].

Leadership in professional development activities in the area of the professional role
including peer seminars, workshops, colloquia, conferences, etc.

Conference Peer Review

In the last three years, I have served as a peer reviewer for the following conferences:

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (2019)
Canadian Society for Studies in Higher Education (2020-2022)
OpenEd (2020-2021)
Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (2020-2022)
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2020-2022)

Technical Consultations for Conferences

During the remote teaching period from March 2020 – August 2021, I consulted with several conferences about how to proceed. I provided care-centred and trauma-informed advice about the best process to undertake and, in some cases, whether to hold the conference at all. The groups I consulted with included:

Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, May 2020: Meetings with the Board to make the decision to cancel the conference.
Ombaashi’s National Online Gathering of the IMNP, August 2020: Provided technical consultation prior to the event and support on the day.
Knowledge Makers Celebration, December 2020: Assistance with building asynchronous resources for transitioned event.
Canadian Symposium on Academic Integrity, June 2021: Provided technical consultation prior to the event and support on the day.
Japan Studies Association of Canada, September 2021: Provided technical consultation prior to the event and support for archiving the sessions afterwards.

Liaison with other post-secondary institutions or scholarly organizations.

Invited Professional Development Workshops at Other Universities and Colleges

Huron University College Session, “Is Anybody Out There?: Care and Community in Remote Learning Contexts” (30 June 2020): In this, the first of a two-workshop series requested by Huron University College, I discussed best strategies for building community and enacting care in the context of online learning, with particular attention to the needs of vulnerable students [D.4.17].
Huron University College Tutor Training, “Care and Community in Virtual Learning Environments” (3 September 2020): I was invited back to Huron to help train the Writing Centre tutors about how to support students at a distance during the pandemic year [D.4.18].
York Session, “Let’s Get Engaged: Strategies to Make the Most out of EClass” (11 May 2021): York University’s Faculty of Science invited me to share strategies for better use of their learning management system (which is a rebranded Moodle).
University of Phoenix Brown Bag Colloquium Series, “(Re-) Inventing Your Place in the Academy: Alt-Academia, Online Community, and You” (13 December 2016): I was invited to speak to the vast network of University of Phoenix faculty members about how to use the internet to seek scholarly community while working remotely.
City University London #citylis International Seminar, “Online Spaces and the Alt-Academic” with Peter Wilkins (10 November 2015): We were invited to London to talk to library and information sciences students about the ways in which online scholarly communities offer all scholars the opportunity to re-invent themselves outside of the confines of traditional tenure-track jobs.

Other leadership roles as a resource person, mentor in teaching and learning
strategies, disciplinary or interdisciplinary engagement, etc.

Teach-In #AgainstSurveillance

A major undertaking – and significant act of interdisciplinary engagement – in December 2020 was my Teach-In #AgainstSurveillance, which was possible because so many Learning Technology & Innovation team members volunteered their non-working time to help make the event a success. I organized the event in response to the Proctorio lawsuit against then-UBC learning technologist Ian Linkletter; my activism started with an open letter to rally the community, but quickly expanded.

The event itself, held on 1 December 2020, was a three-hour virtual event with a series of speakers talking about issues of surveillance. I invited a global slate of scholars and critics: Maha Bali, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Doxtdator, Chris Gilliard, sava saheli singh, Jesse Stommel, and Audrey Watters. Based on the work of Maha Bali, I employed “intentionally equitable hospitality” in order to encourage student participation: student tickets were free, faculty who bought one ticket would have access to bring their whole class to the event, and student questions were self-identified with an asterisk in order to be prioritized in the question and answer periods. To ensure the event was equitable and maximize accessibility, I secured a donation from ISI Live in Ottawa to use their live autocaptioning and transcription function for free (this was a harder technology to access in 2020 than it is now!).

Over 300 people attended the live event. The event raised over $7000 and was named by the Teaching and Learning Centre at the London School of Economics as one of the most important events in education in 2020. 1746 people have watched the archive of the stream and instructors have used the resource in their teaching. In her letter of support for this application [D.8.3], Educational Developer Ann Gagné describes the event as

“a wildly successful teach-in event highlighting the inequities of proctoring software, the resources and discussions during which have been referenced by scholars and colleagues in the field for the last two years. The event modelled an inclusive pedagogy, through the concept of a teach-in, to directly demonstrate via the accessibility supports in place how to respect and engage many scholars, thinkers, and educational advocates from around the world.”

This event made me a public face speaking out against surveillance, and I have had many opportunities to be interviewed and join panel discussions as a result. I am working to make people aware that this issue expands far beyond one lawsuit and one company, but is about a whole class of tools that are damaging education. For example, Brian Lamb and I were interviewed about the event by Terry Greene on his Gettin’ Air podcast, and I was invited to co-host a Virtually Connecting session on the topic.

Appropriate consulting work (e.g., where there is a contribution to professional
development in teaching and learning).

Vancouver Humane Society Digital Training Materials

In January 2022, I helped the Vancouver Humane Society retool their training materials as an online course so that they could continue training throughout Covid-19. They had developed the materials, but I reviewed the resources to maximize accessibility, training the course designer in how to create alt-text and how to test web materials with a screen reader; this was particularly important for PDFs, many of which were not accessible. I also helped them to adjust colour contrast and text legibility, as well as maximizing the efficacy of the site layout. I provided a report of my suggestions [D.4.19].

In our discussions, it became clear that the site needed more interactivity, but they were limited in the selected platform to only have quizzes and videos. After some testing, I realized H5P exercises could be compatible with the platform, and so I trained the course designer in how to develop H5P Branching Scenarios. These were the ideal choice for this application because the Branching Scenario uses if/then logic to guide a user through a problem. For the Vancouver Humane Society, this was a useful way of representing case studies and simulating the kind of role play that would be common in face-to-fact training.

Please note that this was a paid consultancy, but I donated my consultancy fee back to the Vancouver Humane Society to continue their important work.

Leadership on internal or external projects in support of teaching and learning,
including course and program reviews, quality assurance assessments, etc.

Curriculum Work, Douglas College

In my time at Douglas college, I had several opportunities to engage in curriculum development work, which had helped to broaden both my interdisciplinary understanding of how curriculum works and the complexity of revision.

English Department Curriculum Overhaul, 2011-12

When I first arrived at Douglas, I joined the Curriculum Committee, and then co-led the process to overhaul our courses and pathways, which had fallen out of sync with norms in the field. For example, we had a large buffet of first year courses without a lot of guidance for students about how to make selections. As a result, students were taking more first-year Englishes than they could apply to a degree program. We moved many of these courses – including children’s and Canadian literatures, both of which I taught – up to the second year to ensure that students were laddering their courses more effectively. I also rewrote our first year thematic literature course to more closely align with the research universities to which our courses most commonly transferred. As part of this process, I also wrote the curriculum guidelines for a third-year course in literary theory.

Chair, Curriculum Committee of Education Council, 2013-15

For the duration of my time on Education Council, I served on the Curriculum Committee and took the role of Chair. The Curriculum Committee checks every new and revised curriculum guideline in the institution to confirm accuracy and adherence to policy. In this role, I oversaw the transition from a manual process to the adoption of a software program to support this work.

Coordinator, Associate of Arts, 2015-16

I served one term as Coordinator, Associate of Arts, which made me responsible for all two-year interdisciplinary arts degrees at the College. In this role, I updated the curriculum and pathways for all of our degrees: Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, Future Pilots, and Intercultural/International Studies. I also conducted a national site scan of Canadian Studies programs and, due to the low enrolment and the move away from the nationstate as a theme of study, I made the difficult decision to terminate the development of this program.

I approved course transfers into these programs and negotiated articulation agreements out of them, in addition to being responsible for student advising, faculty support, and program promotion. I had the opportunity to host the BCCAT Gender Studies meeting at Douglas College in 2015. I did not continue in this role because I took maternity leave in January 2017.

English Department Program Review, 2016

Throughout much of this period, the English department at Douglas was undergoing a lengthy program review. In 2016, I took on the role of writing about our curriculum. I left the college before this program review was completed.

Awards or public recognition for excellence and/or innovations in the area of the
professional role.

Keynote Talks

I see keynote talks as a significant sign of public and scholarly recognition of expertise in the scholarly role.

*Cascadia21, “Manifesto for the Future: My Hopes for the Post-Pandemic University” (27 April 2021): This was the keynote for the first day of Cascadia and in it I tried to set the tone for this open education conference by talking about what I hope we can change about the university as a structure as we enter the post-pandemic period. I was pleased with how this went, including finding out later that my keynote was the impetus for Coast Mountain College to ban surveillance tools [D.4.20].
^UPEI, “Manifesto for the Future: My Hopes for the Post-Pandemic University” (7 September 2021): I was invited to UPEI to help launch their new teaching and learning centre with a keynote talk. For this, I reused my Manifesto for the Future from Cascadia 21 (at the organizer’s request) and also hosted a reflective practice workshop.
*Selkirk Discovery Day, “True Stories of Real and Imagined Care: The Question of Institutional Relationships” (23 February 2022): I was invited to open Selkirk Discovery Day with a talk about ethic of care thinking that specifically asked me to include stories of care collected around the College during the pandemic [D.4.21].
^O/TESSA, “Things Unsaid: Exploring the Margins and Limits of Open” (19 May 2022): In this highly personal talk, I offered an autoethnography of pregnancy loss set against the backdrop of the pandemic university as a place to chart the margins and limits of open and to ask about the benefits of expanding the scope and possibilities of openness in our institutions [D.4.22].
*Human Services Articulation, “Disrupted Connections: Care and Access As We Move Forward Together” (19 May 2022): The Human Services programs in BC invited me to keynote their articulation meeting. They asked that I talk about what care might look like in human services education as we return to face-to-face instruction [D.4.23].

Professional role outreach making specialized knowledge more broadly accessibleand usable to university faculty and learners in other disciplines and the communitythrough public workshops, lectures seminars, etc.