Message from the Director
Each year, I enjoy the opportunity to sit back and reflect on highlights from CTE’s work with our campus community. As usual, we did a lot: we engaged in numerous consultations, meetings, events, and projects with various campus collaborators. What stands out for me is how we did it—with kindness, care, respect, and authenticity. The kind of work we do often calls upon us to be vulnerable and to support others through their vulnerabilities. It involves relationship-building and taking time to really listen and respond appropriately, whether that entails encouragement or commiseration or a little of both.
This past year, those engaged in higher education have continued to experience challenges around stress, burnout, and reduced wellness. Teaching is often an “all-in” activity, requiring presence, commitment, and dedication that can be hard to bring even at the best of times. At CTE, we strive to support all Waterloo instructors, and create opportunities to bring them together to share, to learn, to connect, and to maintain (or regain) a sense of optimism about their roles.
We strive to support all Waterloo instructors, and create opportunities to bring them together to share, to learn, to connect, and to maintain (or regain) a sense of optimism about their roles.
What we bring to such opportunities—whether they are learning communities, workshops, learning circles, individual or group consultations, conference sessions, and more—is an approach based on curiosity and incremental change. I get no greater satisfaction than engaging with our instructors about their questions, challenges, and opportunities around teaching and learning. There’s honestly nothing quite like it. I value the trust and respect the vulnerability shown in these interactions, and I, like my CTE colleagues, seek to demonstrate the values that I identified earlier.
In this year’s report, we’ve tried to capture and share the impacts that result from our approach and from Waterloo instructors’ teaching practices. I invite you to read about the ways that kindness and care have permeated our conversations and research about teaching and learning. We continued to build our support around Indigenization and decolonization of pedagogy, engaging deeply in foundational elements such as relationship-building and the development of Indigenous materials. We also sought to identify some examples of how the conditions, supports, and resources we provide help instructors (and their students) to thrive as educators.
I’m very proud of the work we’ve done—and continue to build upon—to support teaching and learning at Waterloo today and for the future.