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isotl-symposium-keynote-speaker-Sarah-Bunnell

Sarah Bunnell, PhD
Opening Keynote

Leading with and through SoTL: How a SoTL mindset can transform institutions, our students, and ourselves

Dr. Sarah Bunnell is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Elon University. She is a past-president of the International Society of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and an ISSOTL Distinguished Service Award winner. Dr. Bunnell was recently selected as a Gardner Institute Russell Edgerton Innovation Fellow, which “recognizes distinctively innovative contributions to improving postsecondary education and student success.” A co-author of Being Human in STEM (2023, Routledge), which presents a model of pedagogical partnership as a pathway forward following student protest, she is passionate about building student-faculty-staff partnerships to enhance teaching, learning, and thriving across educational spaces. Her research merges her disciplinary training in developmental and cognitive psychology with her 20 years of work in faculty development and SoTL.

Now more than ever, our institutions need leaders who are not afraid to ask deep and thorny questions about the purposes and outcomes of higher education, to design and collect well-designed and literature-informed inquiries into these questions, and to make the results of these inquires public for dialogue, critique, and collective consideration. These steps should sound familiar: they are SoTL in action! In this keynote, we’ll reflect on the ways that scholarly teachers, with their internalized “SoTL mindsets,” are well-positioned as transformative campus leaders. Drawing on a recent generational analysis of the emergence of SoTL in the Global North (Bunnell, Chick, Hamilton, Santucci Leoni, & Woolmer, 2024), we’ll also consider the individual and institutional factors that enable some individuals to more readily inhabit formal and informal educational leadership spaces than others. With this awareness in mind, we’ll explore models for unlocking SoTL leadership potential in ourselves, our students, and our institutions.

Bunnell, S.L., Chick, N., Hamilton, M., Santucci Leoni, A., & Woolmer, C. (2024).Generations of SoTL Scholars: Transferable Lessons and New Possibilities. Transformative Dialogues, 17(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.26209/td2024vol17iss11801

Bunnell, S.L., Jaswal, S.J., &Lyster, M.B. (2023). Being Human in STEM: Partnering with Students to Shape Inclusive Practices and Communities. Routledge.

isotl-symposium-keynote-speaker-Josh-Hill

Joshua Hill, PhD
Closing Keynote

The world needs SoTL: Collective leadership for dynamic times

Dr. Joshua Hill is an assistant professor in the department of Education at Mount Royal University. Josh, his wife Melanie, and their four children live in Mohkinstsis near the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and his ancestors trace back to Métis and European communities. At the heart of his professorship is a commitment to ethical relationality. He strives to connect on a personal level with each student with the aim of contributing to their sense of belonging and wellbeing. As a teacher educator he is passionate about creating the conditions for teacher candidates to become the teachers they envision being. Through his scholarship, Josh invites teacher candidates, teacher educators, teachers, and educational leaders to partner with him to learn from Indigenous ways of being and (re)story education as a journey towards relationality, reciprocity, wellbeing, and sustainability. He is currently working on bringing land based learning to k-12 and post secondary education.

In the context of our changing climate, rapidly advancing technology, growing social polarization, increasing diversity, and geopolitical uncertainty, post-secondary education needs to devise ways of adapting flexibly. Universities need to be sites of imagining things being otherwise and of agentic action to renew our world. Yet, the hierarchal structures that dominate universities are designed for stability and delimit diversity of ideas necessary for adaptation. In this keynote address Dr. Hill will conceptualize SoTL as a collective leadership system that is rhizomatic, collectivist, emergent, and responsive. He will reflect on the ways in which the SoTL symposium embodies collective leadership and will draw on complexity science, network theory, Métis governance systems and the teachings of trees to expand the space of the possible for how our community of SoTL scholars might foster collective leadership for dynamic times.