2012 EDC Grant Application
1. Applicant Information
Principal Applicant’s Contact Information:
Dr. Natasha Patrito Hannon
Educational Developer and Co-Editor of the Teaching Innovation Projects Journal
Teaching Support Centre, Western University
Rm 122C, D.B. Weldon Library
1151 Richmond Street
London, ON
N6A 5B7
npatrit@uwo.ca
519-661-2111 ext. 84651
Co-Applicant’s Contact Information:
Ms. Nadine LeGros
Language and Communication Instructor and Co-Editor of the Teaching Innovation Projects Journal
Teaching Support Centre, Western University
D.B. Weldon Library
1151 Richmond Street
London, ON
N6A 5B7
nlegros2@uwo.ca
519-661-2111 ext. 80231
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2. Overview
Descriptive Title – At our FingerTIPS: Extending the reach of the Teaching Innovation Projects Journal
Intended Outcomes –
The Teaching Innovation Projects Journal (TIPS - http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tips) is an open-access journal
arising from the Advanced Teaching Program within the Teaching Support Centre of Western
University. It publishes articles produced by graduate students that describe scholarly and pedagogical
foundations for workshops on a variety of timely topics in higher education. Each article includes a
comprehensive list of learning outcomes, an annotated review of relevant literature, and a detailed
breakdown of potential learning activities, among other elements. Since the release of the inaugural
TIPS issue in the spring of 2011, topics such as strategies to maximize student learning from group
projects (Hicks, 2011), approaches for facilitating affective knowledge in the classroom (TeHiwi, 2011),
and creative assignments to promote the development of information literacy skills (Harrington, 2011)
have been explored in workshop format.
In just one year, TIPS has had an impact far beyond that imagined possible by its editors and has
garnered the attention of international scholars. To date, the 20 articles housed in TIPS have been
downloaded over 4100 times by individual users across Canada and as far away as Singapore,
Australia, and Sweden. Twelve of the graduate student authors have been contacted directly by
educational developers and faculty members interested in mounting their proposed workshops at
institutions around the globe. Recently, three Canadian educational developers have made unique
inquiries to ascertain the likelihood of a national call for submissions to the TIPS journal. In each of
their messages, these developers highlighted a desire to disseminate the valuable graduate student
work emerging from their certificate and other professional development programs, and noted the
incredible utility of the pool of workshop descriptions that would be generated through such a call.
Spurred by this interest, the editors of TIPS are seeking to expand the impact of the TIPS journal by
extending a call for submissions to graduate students across Canada. Articles accepted through the
national call will be published in an annual special issue of TIPS. The large scale of this new initiative
necessitates increased logistical, editorial, and financial support. Currently, TIPS is being managed,
reviewed, and edited on a budget of $0 through in-kind contributions of time, energy, and intellect by
staff at Western’s Teaching Support Centre. Funds received via an EDC grant would be used to hire a
graduate student as a part-time editorial assistant. This assistant would communicate with interested
colleagues at teaching and learning centres across Canada to coordinate a call for submissions,
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manage incoming manuscripts, and provide copy-editing support in the final stages of publication.
The intended outcomes of this national call are five-fold: (1) to engage graduate students in a
deep and meaningful exploration of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) research; (2) to
enable larger numbers of graduate students to gain professional experience through the contribution to
and editorial assistance for an open-access, peer-reviewed journal; (3) to promote the development of
discipline-specific, peer-reviewed workshops related to contemporary teaching and learning issues in
higher education; (4) to generate a body of relevant and insightful resources from which students,
faculty and educational developers can draw inspiration; and (5) to create an international site that
encourages dialogue and collaborative creativity around teaching and learning.
Timeline
This initiative will be completed between June 2012 and June 2013, culminating in the publication of a
TIPS national issue in the summer of 2013.
(1)
June – August 2012: Notify educational developers of the intention for a TIPS Canadawide call at the TAGSA (Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student Advancement) specialinterest group meeting during the STLHE conference in Montreal. Through this short
presentation, we will assess interest in this initiative and begin to identify individuals who
are willing to act as TIPS Leads at their respective institutions
Note: The TIPS Lead will be responsible for disseminating
the call for submissions to an appropriate group of graduate
students
at
their
home
institution,
for
collecting
all
submissions from this group of students, for acting as an
initial reviewer to identify a small group of the best articles
(exact number of allowable submissions will depend upon
the number of participating institutions and the number of
proposals received at each individual institution), and for
forwarding this select group of articles on to the TIPS
editorial team for peer-review.
Following the STLHE conference, the TIPS editors will contact teaching and learning
centres at graduate degree-granting institutions that were not present at the TAGSA
meeting to assess their interest in participating in the TIPS national call, and to identify
additional TIPS Leads.
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During this period, the TIPS editors will also create and send out a short survey to TIPS
Leads across Canada to determine the most convenient and effective time (between the
period of September 1st and Nov 1st, 2012) to release the call for submissions.
(2)
September - November 2012: Hire one part-time graduate student as the TIPS editorial
assistant; Release national call for submissions to the first special issue of TIPS. The call
(including submission guidelines and TIPS style sheet) will be sent directly to TIPS Leads,
who will disseminate it to the appropriate group of graduate students at their home
institution.
Depending on the level of interest in the TIPS special issue, TIPS editors may recruit
volunteers from the Canadian educational development community to act as reviewers for
submitted manuscripts.
(3)
December 2012 – February 2013 : The due date by which TIPS submissions are to be
received at home institutions will fall during this period. The editorial assistant will liaise
with TIPS Leads to provide them with criteria for the initial evaluation of submissions and
specific instructions for how the vetted manuscripts are to be submitted to the TIPS editorial
team.
(4)
January to April 2013: Coordinate peer-review of submitted manuscripts using the Digital
Commons software already in place for the TIPS journal. The TIPS editorial assistant will
oversee the review of all articles and communicate the results of these reviews, requests for
revisions, and notices of final acceptance or rejection to authors and TIPS Leads.
(5)
April to May 2013: Copy-editing of accepted manuscripts.
(6)
June 2013: Release of first national issue of TIPS.
Rationale –
The TIPS national call initiative embodies the EDC grant mandate by:
(1) Facilitating critical reflection about ongoing practice – TIPS authorship promotes awareness of
the SOTL literature and provides novice academics with a scholarly foundation for their own
teaching and learning. Extending the TIPS call nationally increases the number of graduate
student authors who are called to reflect, in a concrete and productive fashion, on a significant
need or gap within the teaching and learning domain of their discipline. TIPS contributors
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immerse themselves in the SoTL literature to uncover strategies that might address and
ameliorate these issues, sharing these insights with the community of practice.
(2) Encouraging new directions in educational development – Licensed under the Creative
Commons, the rich body of innovative workshops and resources emerging from TIPS are free
for use or adaptation by all members of the higher education community. These unique seminar
proposals provide a concise review of relevant literature in contemporary teaching and learning
and serve as a repository for workshops that could be delivered at institutions worldwide.
Extending the TIPS call across Canada will highlight unique regional interests and perspectives,
increasing the breadth of resources available to our community of practice.
(3) Enhancing communication among development professionals and building collaborative
structures between institutions – The TIPS national call enhances awareness of this free, openaccess, peer-reviewed resource among both educational development staff and graduate
students. Through the establishment of TIPS Leads, it also creates a network of educational
developers across diverse institutions that is committed to the publication of the TIPS special
issue.
(4) Expanding the impact of successful practices beyond local environments – To date, the 20
student-designed workshops housed within TIPS have been downloaded over 4100 times by an
international audience of faculty members and educational developers. By extending the call for
submissions beyond Western University, graduate students from across Canada will have the
opportunity to share their insights with the higher education community, gaining exposure in a
new academic domain and a valuable peer-reviewed publication.
The seed funding provided by this initial EDC grant will allow the editorial team of TIPS to
establish efficient mechanisms for the coordination of a national TIPS submission call and the
review and publication of resulting manuscripts. It is our intention that, once these processes
have been refined and a network of interested colleagues has been established, we will
continue to publish a yearly, Canada-wide special issue for the foreseeable future.
Scholarship –
In recent years, several scholars have called for the restructuring of graduate education to enhance the
status of the SoTL within the academy. Shulman (2004), among others, argues that SoTL should be
formally integrated into the graduate experience: “By involving doctoral students more directly with the
scholarship of teaching and learning at the very beginning of their understanding of what it means to be
a faculty member, we may create scholars who learn early on how to elegantly integrate their teaching
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with their research.” Some scholars have argued that it is important to not only introduce graduate
students to the SoTL literature, but also to engage them in SoTL research as collaborative partners
(Kreber, 2001). As McKinney (2006) suggests, “We are challenged to expand the role of students in
SOTL…as collaborators and co-researchers.” TIPS authorship invites graduate students to discover
the ways in which SOTL can inform their personal teaching practice, and that of their discipline.
Authors engage in the practice of educational development by distilling contemporary SOTL work into a
coherent series of learning activities that can be shared with colleagues to further inform their
instruction. At a fundamental level, the TIPS journal responds to the calls of Shulman and McKinney by
making graduate students true contributors and collaborators in the EDC’s efforts to inform and
innovate teaching and learning across Canada and beyond.
Dissemination Work submitted via the national call will be published in a special Summer 2013 issue of TIPS. Due to
the open-access nature of TIPS, all peer-reviewed articles will be freely available on-line to individuals
worldwide. The editorial team plans to present a panel session during the upcoming EDC meeting at
Laurier (2013) that will highlight the experiences of graduate student authors engaged in the TIPS
process. This will be followed by a session at the 2013 STLHE meeting that will more specifically
highlight the outcomes of the TIPS national call initiative and coincide with the release of the special
Summer issue. The graduate student editorial assistant will be invited to contribute to and co-present
any conference workshops or other scholarly work emerging from their TIPS involvement.
3. Budget
Item (including any applicable taxes)
Cost
2486.00
Salaries
Graduate student research assistants, $20 per hour x 110 hours
Benefits
at $2.60 per hour x 110 hours
Total Costs
Less in-kind contributions
Total amount requested from the EDC Grant Program
2486.00
0.00
2486.00
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4. References Cited
Harrington, J. R. (2011). Alternatives to the Term Paper: Creative assignments that
develop information literacy skills. Teaching Innovation Projects, 1(1), Article 5.
Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tips/vol1/iss1/5
Hicks, C. (2011). Guiding Group Work: Activities to maximize student learning from
group projects. Teaching Innovation Projects, 1 (1), Article 6.
Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tips/vol1/iss1/6
Kreber, C. (2001). The scholarship of teaching and its implementation in faculty
development and graduate education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 86,
79-88.
McKinney, K. (2006). Attitudinal and structural factors contributing to challenges in the
work of the scholarship of teaching and learning. New Directions for Institutional
Research, 129, 37-60.
Shulman, L.S. (2004).Visions of the possible: Models for campus support of the
scholarship of teaching and learning. In W. E. Becker & M. L. Andrews (Eds.), The
scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education (pp 9-23). Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Te Hiwi, B. (2011). Effecting Affect: Methods for facilitating affective knowledge in the
classroom. Teaching Innovation Projects, 1(2), Article 1.
Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tips/vol1/iss2/1
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