B3

Interprofessional Education Through Self-Constructed Poetry

Authors have explored the use of poetry as an evaluative or reflective tool within a classroom setting (Cronin & Hawthorne, 2019; Jack & Illingworth, 2019; Uligraff, 2019). However, there is limited research on educators self-creating poetry relating personal experiences with course content to teach complex theoretical and conceptual topics to interprofessional group of students.In an interprofessional education session with students representing at least five different health professions, learners were introduced to poetry written by the session lead to enhance their understanding of theoretical and conceptual topics in healthcare. In this session, the focus was on helping learners understand person- centered care and interprofessional collaboration from the patient’s perspective. Various performative and artistic means were executed during the session to tap into students’ cognitive, emotive, and creative learning abilities. The performance of poetry and critical discussion of the meaning behind the words the session lead was trying to convey helped students enhance their comprehension of conceptual and theoretical content. It also led to the generation of takeaways for application in their evolving healthcare practice and education on how to enter collaborative partnerships with patients in acute care. This transformative pedagogical tool can offer a diverse teaching approach that can be used as a basis for generating meaningful discussions, increasing collaboration among students, and deepening students’ understanding of concepts as it is linked to the development of an emotive connection with session content. Thus, it is important to consider this art-based approach to deeply engage students in their learning, promote critical thinking skills, and support the linkage between theory with practice.

Presenters

Across the Universe-City: How the co-creation of a short-film engaged a campus community

In the spring of 2022, I embraced an amazing opportunity to work with the Employees with Disabilities Community Network (EwDCN) at TMU in the co-creation of a grassroots community-led film project, titled Across the Universe-City. The film captured stories of lived experiences and provided information on supports available on campus and increased the awareness of accessibility and barriers, and to provide resources to both employees with disabilities and to the broader TMU community on how to address them. The film is a valuable and lasting resource informing our understanding and approach to accessibility as a shared responsibility, which will benefit all members of our community. In doing so, the learning went deep and wide across the campus community and included students who contributed to film’s success on and off camera. Morevocer, the film serves as a valuable pedagogical tool, which addresses issues related to inclusivity and accessibility at the forefront of Digital Pedagogy. The pedagogical framework seamlessly aligns with the 2024 TMU Learning & Teaching Conference’s theme of Technology and Teaching in an Age of Disruption. I wish to share my learning about the process that led to the co-creation, conception, production, and successful launch of the short film Across the Universe-City on December 7, 2023. As a seasoned producer, the process of co-creating this film was a valuable new learning for me was to listen, understand, and implement the needs of the EwDCN community. What barriers have they encountered in their work, research and practice? How have they resolved them? What barriers remain? This was an opportunity to reflect on and share frameworks and best practices that have helped to reduce pedagogical barriers and integrate digital pedagogy approaches.

Presenters

Creating Space: Building Community, Inclusivity and Dialogue within the Classroom

Many students are entering higher education after going through years of the pandemic. For them, recentering the classroom space - as a place that is life-sustaining, mind expanding and a place of liberation for both students and teachers - can behave as a revolutionary act. This, especially in current conditions where there remain so few communal spaces, or places of gathering (or incentive for gathering) for students on campus and in the community. Drawing on bell hooks' work on education as the practice of freedom, I argue that rather than expanding learning beyond the classroom, there is equal worth in recentering learning and personal self-growth within the classroom. If done correctly, and with an attention to mutual respect, inclusivity, and student empowerment, the class room emerges as one of the few remaining collective sites of liberation. In my own practice I have helped cultivate this through emphasizing a dialogical pedagogy in class, as well as through the use of assignment workshops.

Presenters