Traditional Call for Proposals (T-CFP)

Festival of Teaching and Learning 2023 T-CFP (Traditional Call for Proposals)

Traditions Re-Imagined:
Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning Teaching

All submissions are due by 11:59pm MST on Friday, February 24th, 2023 and will go through a peer review process.

We’ve been teaching for a long, long time. Here at the U of A specifically, we’ve been teaching for well over a century (115 years by 2023), and during this century-plus of our teaching, we have become, for better and for worse, steeped in tradition and continue to soak in the traditional. Since the Spring of 2020 that brought with it the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic together with the murder of Mister George Floyd that sparked a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement and with the dis-covering of missing and murdered Indigenous little ones at (residential) schoolgrounds-turned-gravesites across this nation now called Canada, all of us have been forced to finally stop not-looking at structural, colonial violence, eugenics, and brutality across our entrenched systems. December 2022/January 2023 seems to have brought with it, too, the long-foreshadowed dawn of AI (in education) with human-like text-generating and image-generating computer programs and mobile apps. All this pushing on the concept of traditional and on the traditions these enmeshed systems of control hold dear has also moved and continues to move us folks in post-secondary education to break with our rote, binary understandings of the tradition of teaching and learning in higher education. As Dr. Frankie Condon reflectively wrote over a decade ago: “After all this work…after all this thinking and talking and writing and learning, unlearning, and relearning, I still do not know.”1 Thinking, talking, writing…and learning, unlearning, and relearning. For us, in this moment 115 years since our establishment, since our literal settling, on/overtop of ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (amiskwacîwâskahikan), we should more intentionally start thinking, talking, writing, and learning, unlearning, and relearning teaching at the U of A. This will be no easy feat. Not comfortable work in the least. But paradigm shifts never have been, never are, and never will be. As U of A’s Drs. Jennifer Ward and Cindy Gaudet together with Dr. Tricia McGuire-Adams importantly tell us: “[R]econciliation is not an immediate goal; rather, it must be an ongoing process that helps to achieve decolonization and the disruption of settler colonialism.”2

FORMAT GENRES

There will be four types of presentations/sessions in the hybrid Festival program for 2023: Papers; Kitchen Table Conversations; Panel Discussions; and “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.”

  • Papers - 10-15-minute “traditional” (or, not-so-traditional!) papers to be shared live and synchronously during the hybrid Festival (May 2nd-4th) with time after for open, decolonized discussion and conversation (FoTL Adjudication Committee will assemble Paper Panels out of synergistic individual paper proposals for 2-3 on one Paper Panel.)
  • Kitchen Table Conversations - 15-20-minute “traditional” (or again, not-so-traditional) breakout-room-style conversations on topics of community members’ choosing that will be pre-determined in advance of the Festival to be engaged with live and synchronously during the hybrid Festival (May 2nd-4th) in small groups of no more than 12 participants each.
  • Panel Discussions - 45-minute “traditional” (or, yet again, not-so-traditional!) panels for live discussion synchronously during the hybrid Festival (May 2nd-4th) with pre-assembled panelists (45 minutes is the full time for individual sessions, so budget time accordingly based on number of panelists, time for attendee Q+A/discussion/what have you, etc.)
  • “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” - Something we haven’t thought of but that you’re thinking of and that isn’t quite a paper, kitchen table conversation, and/or panel discussion. Tell us what tradition you’re re-imagining and/or wanting to push toward re-imagining, and let’s re-imagine it into existence with you! (Maybe it’s a microteaching demo? Maybe it’s a self-care/community-care session? Maybe it’s traditional tea making with an Indigenous community member? Maybe it’s like an Idea Lab or a ThinkTank or a showcase of student work? Maybe it’s singing, dancing, videography, something land-based, art, architecture, clothing…only you might know!)

We are encouraging, and even more strongly, we are empowering all members of the University of Alberta teaching and learning community - instructors, researchers, Undergraduate students, Graduate students, Postdoctoral scholars, staff, co-op/Work-Integrated-Learning (WIL)/Community Service Learning (CSL) partners, senior administration, all of us - who are wanting to share their experiences, ideas, challenges, celebrations, and intersectionalities around re-imagining traditions toward learning, unlearning, and relearning teaching to submit a proposal for FoTL 2023.

PROPOSAL REQUIREMENTS AND SUBMISSION

We ask that each proposal as clearly as possible outlines its intended engagement with the Festival theme Traditions Re-Imagined and situates its focus with learning, unlearning, and relearning teaching in one of the above four presentation/session genres.

All submissions must be made online, following the guidelines listed below. Notices of acceptance will be sent via email by early March 2023. Please be aware that the Adjudication Committee reserves the right to select the final presentation format in order to meet the needs of conference planning.

Each proposal must include:

  • Name(s) and contact information
  • Department, School, Faculty, or Unit
  • Format Genre
  • Title for proposed session*
    • *If submitting toward a Kitchen Table Conversation topic, please name/outline/describe it here, and please tell us if you might be interested in facilitating this session and/or might be interested in being a participant in it
  • Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning Outcomes/Objectives of proposed session (i.e., “By the end of this paper/panel, Festival attendees will…” or, “By engaging in this session/poster, Festival goers will…”)
  • 1-2 line note indicating how you see your session aligning with the FoTL 2023 theme (audience/readers for this: internal-facing/peer reviewers considering your proposal)
  • 2-3 line summary/description of proposed session for Festival website (audience/readers for this: public-facing/Festival goers and participants)

All submissions are due by 11:59pm MST on Friday, February 24th, 2023 and will go through a peer review process.

And if all this traditional CFP as a genre and submission form is not helpful to your idea nor inclusive/accessible for you to propose your FoTL 2023 engagement, please review the FoTL 2023 Re-Imagined Call for Proposals (RI-CFP) for that genre with its language, goals, and processes. There’s never just one method, nor just one genre, toward whole person engagement in academia.

Notes:

1. Frankie Condon, I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. Utah State UP, 2012, p.163.↩

2. Jennifer Ward, Cindy Gaudet, and Tricia McGuire-Adams, “The Privilege of Not Walking Away: Indigenous Women’s Perspectives of Reconciliation in the Academy.” aboriginal policy studies, 9.2 (2021): 3-24; p. 6.↩