Igniting our Practice Speakers

For this session, we ask inspirational University of Waterloo professors to draw us into their disciplines and into the learning spaces they create for their students by teaching us a concept from their own courses.  The methods they use are diverse, but the intention underlying them is the same: to engage students in thinking about important disciplinary concepts and questions.  After each presenter takes us into his or her learning space, we’ll have the opportunity to reflect on and discuss the ways in which these methods might be adapted in our own fields and within our own classrooms.

​Greta Kroeker

Prof. Greta Kroeker is Associate Professor of History at UW.  She teaches classes on the History of Western Civilization, Early Modern Europe (1450-1750), Religion and Violence, and a spicy one on Early Modern Women called, “Witches, Wives, and Whores.”  In her course designs and lectures, she seeks to help students connect with historical events and meet historical peoples on their own terms, improve writing, build empathy, and helped create informed global citizens.  She seeks to offer a variety of avenues for students to play to their own strengths and connect with and make meaningful the past through strategies like project and group based learning, semester long research endeavors, and creative experiential learning opportunities.  

Pulling students back in time to connect with history can be challenging, especially in large classroom.  In this session, Prof. Kroeker will demonstrate how students in her large lecture classes connect with primary sources and produce a group response to share with the whole class.   

Troy Vasiga

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Troy Vasiga is a Lecturer in the David. R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and Associate Director of the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing.  In his 18 years lecturing at UW, he has taught over 6500 students.  He was awarded the Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching in 2009.  He spends a large portion of his time visiting secondary and elementary schools to talk about mathematics and computer science, in Ontario, across Canada and around the world.

In this lecture, Troy will discuss the fundamental concept of recursion, which is one of the core ideas in the first-year computer science major course.  In discussing this concept, Troy will approach the problem from a variety of perspectives:  the technical, the philosophical, the psychological, and the literary in order to resonate and reverberate individually and collectively in the minds of the students.

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