Editorial: Call and Response Issue

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Welcome to the latest issue of Imagining SoTL: Selections from the Banff Symposium. This issue represents a bit of an experiment. Our last symposium for SoTL, in November 2022, seemed particularly thought-provoking, and we were proud of the lively community and conversations so evident throughout the conference. The opening keynote address, given by Randy Bass, was called “Architecture of the Unexpected: Imagining SoTL Beyond the Learning Paradigm” and was a tremendously energizing and catalyzing opening. Randy challenged us to think about SoTL’s role as we move into new horizons in higher education. Gabrielle Weasel Head, our closing keynote speaker, spoke powerfully about what Indigenous pedagogies have to offer SoTL, sending us back to our contexts with much to ponder. We decided that we were not quite ready to let these conversations go and invited each speaker to write a piece for this issue. Randy has provided a synopsis of his talk, and Gabrielle has developed her keynote into a paper entitled “Envisioning SoTL Through a Lens of Indigenous Cultural Continuity,” which explores and develops the ideas she shared with us in November.

We then created a call for proposals inviting conference attendees to respond to the keynotes. This issue includes two pieces that do that, one from Alice de Koning et al., in response to Randy’s keynote, and one from Natalie Beltrano, in response to Gabrielle’s. In each case, the authors take the ideas they gathered from one of the keynotes and develop and relate them to their own ideas and contexts. These responses have helped to deepen our reflections on the keynotes and demonstrate how some of the ideas proposed by Randy and Gabrielle could be put into practice.

In recent years, a signature element of our symposium has become Pop-Up Poetry. In the beginning, we thought of it as an enjoyable and novel offering to conference attendees, but we have found it to be a powerful conference pedagogy in its own right. As part of this “Call and Response” issue, we offer two essays written by the poets, Richard Harrison and Beth Everest, as well as two responses to the experience, one by Odd Rune Stalheim and the other by Janet Tilstra.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. It seems a perfect segue into our next symposium, happening in just a few weeks, where we will continue the conversation.

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