Brave Conversations in SoTL is a collaborative speakers’ series that brings together an international slate of scholars to discuss ideas around critical approaches to themes of epistemic justice, students as knowers, and threshold experiences in higher education. The series is in collaboration with the University of Calgary's Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.

Season Three of Brave Conversations In SoTL explores the many ways that risk can be understood, taken up, and experienced by those engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

Risk-taking is often framed in celebratory terms — entrepreneurial, innovative, bold. While this can be a positive rendering, we want to trouble that familiar narrative. What might open up if we invited our community to think about risk in more pluralistic, more nuanced ways? How might our understanding of risk-taking, innovation, and failure in SoTL change when we look through an intersectional lens? What if we centred the lived experiences of those for whom “taking a risk” is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but something that carries real professional, personal, or emotional stakes?

Learn more on our programming page or register now.

What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)?

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is the developing field of original research & scholarship about teaching and learning practice specifically in the context of higher education. It is conducted by scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, who are interested in understanding student learning, innovations in teaching practice, and transformation of higher education.

The Gift of Our Name

The Mokakiiks Centre for SoTL was previously the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In 2020, we were incredibly honoured to have been gifted a Blackfoot name, Mokakiiks. This name, gifted by Miiksika’am, Elder Clarence Wolfleg, means a lodge for wisdom. In the virtual naming ceremony, Elder Miiksika’am explained how to think about this lodge as not a static place for the accumulation of knowledge, but rather a gathering place of wise people, who get together to continue learning and then share their wisdom with future generations. We cannot think of a better aspiration for SoTL.