Editorial

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Welcome to the latest issue of Imagining SoTL. This issue consists of responses to a call for papers based on presentations and discussions sparked by the 2021 Virtual Forum for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with a theme of “Catalyzing Conversations: Energizing SoTL.” In 2020, we canceled our symposium due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and, in 2021, like so many conference organizers, we decided that meeting online was the safest choice. We felt it was crucial to find ways to engage at a distance as we navigated our drastically changed work environments. Readers may notice that the content of certain articles directly reflects the pandemic context while others were impacted in terms of methodology or the thinking pursued.

Volume 2, Issue 2 contains six articles from Canadian institutions, involving a total of 23 authors, including 11 students. This illustrates the deeply collaborative nature of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The first article, “Visualizing the Power and Privilege of Failure in Higher Education” by Ross et al., takes a critical cultural lens to explore models of failure in higher education, experimenting with three visual representations. In Manarin et al.’s “Learning About Our Disciplinary Reading Through Interdisciplinary Conversations,” the multidisciplinary team offers a polyvocal exploration of their own disciplinary reading practices and potential implications for students in their courses. “Involving Students as Partners in a Course Redesign,” by Kim et al., is a collaborative ethnography in a students-as-partners model, illustrating the importance, value, and challenges of engaging students in meaningful roles for curricular transformation.

The next three articles demonstrate SoTL in three different contexts. In “Advancing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Larger Enrolment Courses,” Anselmo et al. describe a faculty learning community that met online to provide support for faculty members as they moved their classes online due to the pandemic. In contrast “The Language of Students,” by Skrlac and Booke, presents the first phase of a classroom-based SoTL project, looking at how students experience, label, and describe individual classes. Finally, in “Catalyzing Conversations: Motivation for and Lessons Learned While Developing Critical Thinking Skills in the Post-Truth Era,” another broadly multidisciplinary team reflects on their experience designing a K–12 program to promote vaccine safety, focusing on critical thinking.

As we publish this issue at the close of 2022, while it would be rash to consider ourselves post-pandemic, we have once again been able to meet in Banff just last month. I’ll speak for myself in saying that this has filled me with gratitude for all the richness that comes with face-to-face presence and conversation. We look ahead to two issues in 2023 as we shift our publication model to a twice-a-year offering. We hope you enjoy these articles and the insights they offer, and look forward to your submissions to our next call.

Dr. Michelle Yeo
Editor-in-Chief
Imagining SoTL: Selections from the Banff Symposium