McMaster to host world’s top teaching and learning experts
Some of the world’s leading researchers in the field of teaching and learning – including students themselves – will be among more than 500 delegates when McMaster hosts the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference for four days, starting Wednesday, Oct. 24.
The conference is organized by McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning, and is expected to be a lively forum for rising global interest in improving the quality of teaching and learning in higher education – a particular priority for McMaster.
It will also be one of Hamilton’s largest conferences for 2012. Organizers are expecting representatives from 18 countries, covering six continents. The conference will be the 9th annual for the society, with previous locations including Liverpool, Vancouver and Sydney, Australia.
The conference is to be set at the Hamilton Convention Centre and Sheraton Hamilton Hotel, where it is expected to be a showcase for emerging scholarship in a vital field, and for McMaster’s growing profile in that field, said conference co-chair Beth Marquis.
“It’s a chance for McMaster to showcase the excellent work we’re doing in this area, as well as an opportunity to connect with and learn from other leading researchers from around the world,” said Marquis, an educational consultant at the university’s Centre for Leadership in Learning.
Among the sessions featured at the conference will be a plenary address by Harvey Weingarten, president and CEO of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Weingarten, who served as McMaster’s provost from 1996 to 2001 and as president of the University of Calgary from 2001 to 2010, will be speaking Friday morning about integrating teaching and learning into the broader university culture.
Another major plenary will focus on involving students as change agents in teaching and learning. Rather than treating them merely as the subjects of research, the panel session will look at involving students in making changes that will affect their own teaching and learning. The panel itself is composed of professors and students from a range of institutions.
“We’re especially excited about that,” Marquis said.
McMaster’s Walter Peace, a professor of geography and expert on Hamilton, will tell delegates about Hamilton history at the Friday banquet, to be held at LIUNA Station. That banquet will also feature a display of art by students from McMaster’s School of the Arts.
The conference is to be preceded immediately by two days of collective writing between student researchers, faculty members and staff from far-flung schools who will be coming together in Hamilton and forming groups to collaborate on scholarly papers which will be submitted for publication.
More information about the conference is available at http://issotl12.com
