We are excited to announce that the 2020 CUT Award has been awarded to Amanda Raffoul, a PhD student at the School of Public Health and Health Systems. Amanda’s graduate research explores how food- and weight-related public health policies might have unintended consequences for the social and psychological wellbeing of young adults in Canada.
Each year, the Centre for Teaching Excellence and Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs acknowledge one CUT program participant in recognition and celebration of effort that goes above and beyond the course requirements.
The Certificate in University Teaching (CUT) program provides a comprehensive teacher development experience that is open to PhD students at the University of Waterloo. Completion of the program is recognized by a certificate issued by Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs.
The CUT award recognizes Amanda’s scholarly approach to teaching and the ways in which she seeks to integrate disciplinary scholarship on critical weight studies and social justice frameworks into her classroom pedagogies.
We spoke to Amanda about her experience with the CUT program and her thoughts about teaching in a post-secondary environment.
How did you integrate your research interests into your work with the CUT program?
My CUT research workshop focused on how to implement strategies that incorporate weight-based social justice frameworks into public health classrooms. Throughout my graduate studies, I found that many public health instructors were uncomfortable with weight-related topics, including language (e.g., “Do I say obese person or person with obesity?” “Is the word fat offensive?”) and framing (e.g., “How do I talk about weight-neutral frameworks in a health class?”). This motivated me to investigate what strategies other instructors in critical weight studies and education research were using to explore complex topics in their classrooms, and to create a workshop that could be delivered to public health instructors.
What kinds of reflection did the CUT program stimulate for you? Has that reflection had an impact on your teaching?
My own beliefs about how higher weights are framed in public health and society more broadly are always evolving – the more I read, the more questions I have! I tried to incorporate this conflict and growth into my CUT reflections, which served as benchmarks for me to look back at my progress in the program. The CUT program also allows you to try out teaching techniques in a variety of settings, including workshops, supervised teaching events, and in research papers, which gave me the confidence to reflect on what I had done, what I wanted to do, and what didn’t work for me.
What did you get out of the CUT program? How do you hope to apply what you’ve learned?
I thought that I had teaching all “figured out,” but the CUT program really opened my eyes to how the scholarship of teaching and learning could unfold in a classroom. The CTE staff and workshop facilitators always emphasized that pedagogy was iterative and that teachers should adapt their instruction style to fit the learners’ needs. This motivated me to spend extra time crafting every lesson plan to consider what learners were going to get out of each teaching event and how I could keep them engaged with content outside of the classroom. Through the incredible CUT workshops, I learned about and practiced teaching techniques that were new to me and seamlessly fit with my research interests. This culminated in my final research project and teaching dossier, which I’ll continue to use and adapt as I gain teaching experience both inside and outside of university classrooms.
Do you have any future plans that you can tell us about?
Yes! I plan to defend my PhD dissertation this Spring term and will be beginning a postdoctoral fellowship with STRIPED (Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders), based at Boston Children’s Hospital & the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, this September.