This year’s Festival of Teaching and Learning (or FoTL, endearingly pronounced like foughtle, if you please) might look and feel a little bit… different, shall we say? Not only does it have a majestic unicorn-pegasus hybrid as its thematic mascot and iconic focus, but it has a thematic title that threatens the status quo 150-character-count-limit of any traditional scholarly paper title: (Re)Imagining Post-Pandemic Pedagogies: Critical, Creative, and Affective Reflections on Where We Are Now, Where We’ve Come From, and Where We’re Hoping to Go. (Count ’em up yourself: 160 characters, including spaces, in all their disruptive glory.) And say what you may, but none of this was accidental, lazy, nor without essential reflective praxis.
Nearly three decades before the COVID-19 global pandemic still gripping our present moment, bell hooks (may she rest in power) shared with the burgeoning worlds of pedagogies writ large that her reaction to the stress and apathy of systemic oppression in higher education is “to imagine ways that teaching and the learning experience could be different” (Teaching to Transgress, 5). Today, continuing toward social, racial, and health justice in the academy and, as we here at the U of A say, for the public good, hooks’ reflection, now a call and challenge to us, is more vital than ever. As we move closer to a world of teaching and learning on the other side of this pandemic, we can invoke our criticality, creativity, and affect as university teachers, learners, and whole people to imagine into existence real ways that teaching and learning experiences can be not just different but more diverse and even more dynamic. We often cite our students’ “critical thinking” as pedagogically powerful and (fingers crossed!) their “critical reflection,” too; and we occasionally see and push towards creative thinking as well… so what about creative reflection? And what, perhaps more importantly, now more than ever, about affect and affective reflection?
These were just some of the early questions the FoTL 2022 Steering Committee met head on in our discussions and imaginings of what, and how, FoTL 2022 might meet our U of A teaching and learning community where we are now, but also where we’ve come from and where we are needing to go and get to. At FoTL 2022, you’ll not only get to engage with a variety of papers, presentations, and posters on teaching and learning here at the U of A but also sit in on some teaching demonstrations, learn about some innovative, out-of-the-box teaching methods (like crafting in the classroom, and teaching via mobile phone apps!), as well as connect in real-time with peers, friends, and colleagues (existing and as-yet-unmet!) to share and talk about cool things we are up and can get up to in our classrooms … online, hybrid, and face-to-face. And in these sharings and talking-abouts, we know there will be excellent food for thought and digestion for action as we step, individually and together, into the braver and newer worlds (yes, plural) of our post-pandemic pedagogies (yes, again plural).
And so… why the hybrid unicorn-pegasus as the visual icon? Well, first of all, is anyone really surprised that my first time chairing FoTL would have this particular fabulous icon centred so? (She did hold back on the glitter, though, okay?) Secondly — and seriously now — unicorns and the Pegasus separately are imaginary and fabled (fable from fabula; fabulous) creatures who each take the real-world horse as their base figure upon which (by the addition of a single horn or a pair of wings, respectively) they are imagined into existence. A hybrid of the two — why not add a single horn and a pair of wings? — is, then, a re-imagining of them into existence. And if you look real closely, you’ll see in the design of the FoTL 2022 icon a reflection of a horse beneath the fierce new hybrid charging their way forward into the future: where we’ve come from; where we’re hoping to go.
We might not often value enough in higher education imagination, the imaginative, and the power of being able to imagine/image-in and to powerfully image-in(to) existence real difference, real change, real empowerment. That’s also why, you’ll notice, we do not have a traditional Keynote Speaker anchoring this year’s Festival… becausewho better to partner in centring and securing this year’s theme than our very own U of A students? Our very own U of A students who chose us, chose to study with us, chose to come here and live and grow and stay with us for this step on their journeys? That’s right: this year, we have two Keynote Conversations with U of A students, and so we are humbled, honoured, and truly grateful that these students will be generously gifting us their time, their stories, their lived experiences, and their own (re)imaginings of post-pandemic pedagogies here at the U of A, specifically through the lens of Accommodation and Proactive Design in teaching and learning, next week at our 2022 Festival.
And I wouldn’t have (also couldn’t have, let’s be honest) and didn’t do any of this alone: the FoTL 2022 Steering Committee quite literally imagined-and-steered next week’s event into existence. I just get to blog about it under my name. And so next week, formally and with the entire U of A teaching and learning community, I will also get the incredible honour and privilege of recognizing and celebrating each individual without whom I wouldn’t be sitting here, typing away on my laptop about how incredible our 2022 Festival is going to be as we collectively start and continue (re)imagining our post-pandemic pedagogies into powerful existence. Unicorns and Pegasuses, the lot of us.
I hope you will join us, and I can’t wait to see you there.
About Tommy
Tommy Mayberry (he/she/they) is a raced-white, queer and trans-, settler-scholar and academic drag queen, and they are the executive director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning. Tommy grew up on the Haldimand Tract in what is now called southwestern Ontario and is the partner of experimental digital media artist Tommy Bourque (yes, together they're "The Tommies"). Their family is complete with their soon-to-be 17-year-old Pekingese Chihuahua, Sam.