Monday, December 12, 2022

CUPE files to certify employee group

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has applied to the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) to be the exclusive representative of a group of University of Waterloo employees.

The OLRB is processing CUPE’s Certification Application.   

Where to find information 

The University has coordinated with a representative from each Faculty to post relevant documents related to the Certification Application on bulletin boards throughout campus.  

We have updated these locations with our Response to the Application. Please take the opportunity to read all information carefully. 

Please contact Stephanie Oliver-Guppy in Human Resources with any questions you might have.

How to build an anti-bullying robot

By Stephanie Longeway. This article was originally published in the Fall 2022 issue of Waterloo Magazine.

Children who have been bullied or have witnessed a friend being bullied often suffer in silence, not knowing how to process their traumatic experiences or respond to bullying in the future. 

Elaheh (Ellie) Sanoubari (PhD in progress) wants to change that by using social robots and games to help children understand bullying and develop skills to intervene. 

“You can’t put two children together and ask them to role-play bullying. It could end badly,” said Sanoubari, a PhD student in the Department of Systems Design Engineering. “But we can use social robots as a proxy for role-playing so children can control their behaviours and practise intervention strategies in a safe, private and playful setting.”  

Sanoubari is currently building a new drama-based game called RE-Mind — Robots Empowering Minds. In this game, a child can watch a bullying-related scenario played out by robots and enact in the role play by controlling a bystander robot.  

Building meaning through drama

This idea set the engineer on an unlikely path to the University of Waterloo’s theatre and performance program. “I have always loved theatre and drama. In many ways, robots remind me of that world, especially social robots because when you design them to act out social human interaction, what you are essentially doing is creating a performance with the robot,” she said. 

Sanoubari’s supervisor is Kerstin Dautenhahn, director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory and Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics. Dautenhahn suggested that Sanoubari bring in an applied theatre expert to support her work and introduced her to Professor Andrew (Andy) Houston from the Faculty of Arts. 

Applied theatre is the practice of using drama techniques to evoke reflection and learning in order to bring about social change. “I had never heard of applied theatre before speaking with Andy, and this new concept was a wonderland for me. I was seeing how it all connected to my work and it shaped my approach,” Sanoubari said. 

Houston explained that “when we see something enacted, and it affects us, it can change our thinking and what do we do with that experience.” This offers performers and the audience an opportunity to create meaning and understanding through a performance or by re-enacting a scenario.

Sanoubari, Houston and Dautenhahn devised an idea to have children learn bullying intervention techniques by role-playing with a robot who would be the bystander in a peer-bullying story. Houston added, “We wanted to create a safe distance for the kids … it is hard to go back to a traumatic scenario. The robot creates that distance for the child.” 

During the research they asked children, with the support of their parents, to create fictional robots themselves using materials around their home. Sanoubari said, “This was all done to help the children create a sense of psychological ownership with the characters that they were building.” 

The team worked together to craft stories and scenarios that would prompt the children as they interacted with their robot character, but also let the children lead some of the storytelling and create fictional personalities for the characters. 

Sanoubari wanted to ensure her anti-bullying game captured the creativity and the rationale of the children who would ultimately be the users of the game. 

“It is important to involve the people using the technology from the get-go and build it with them. We wanted to go to children and see how they envision such a system.” 

Building interdisciplinary solutions

As a theatre director and scholar, Houston and his work could be seen as very far removed from the world of robotics, but he said he is learning a lot from working with Sanoubari and the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab.  

“Ellie sees these re-enactments and storytelling from a very different perspective than I do. It’s like working with someone who speaks an entirely different language,” he said. “What I enjoy about collaborating with other people who come from very different understandings of theatre is that they give me tremendous insight and wisdom into my practice and what we are creating.”  

Sanoubari agreed, and that is where robotics can learn from applied theatre and take a lead role in creating meaningful human-robot interactions. 

“My interests have always been very dynamic,” she said. “But what my work in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab has taught me is to re-think problems and that most problems in the world require building interdisciplinary solutions.” 

Introducing CTE's Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-Racism team

This is adapted from an article originally published on the Centre for Teaching Excellence's website.

In November 2021, CTE hired Leslie Wexler as a Senior Educational Developer in Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-Racist (IKAR) Pedagogies, followed some months later by Nahannee Schuitemaker, Madison Hill, and Jessica Rumboldt who work in more specific areas of IKAR. Having now settled into their individual positions and developed into a distinct five-person team, which includes Savannah Sloat, Manager of Indigenous Initiatives in the Faculty of Science, we asked each of them to share their role, current area of focus, and vision for the future of IKAR at Waterloo. 

Leslie Wexler 
Senior Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges & Anti-Racist Pedagogies 

Role: Leslie is a Métis woman from Treaty Six territory in northern Alberta and is in the final stage of defending her PhD at the University of Toronto. Leslie’s position has three main areas of focus: 1) contribute to the planning, development, and implementation of institutional strategic initiatives regarding Indigenization and anti-racism efforts in undergraduate and graduate teaching and learning, 2) oversee discipline-specific consultations and facilitation by educational developers, and 3) content creation with an Indigenous, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist focus.  

Current Area of Focus: Leslie oversees and participates in the work of the IKAR Educational Developers across disciplines. Her work is rooted in relationships with people, place, and traditional teachings. She meets faculty and staff wherever they are on their journey by tapping into their curiosity and engagement with Indigenous Knowledges.  

Vision: Leslie’s vision is to see Indigenous Knowledges as a distinct field in higher education. She believes Canadian universities must establish vibrant Indigenous Knowledges programs where traditional knowledge can be explored as a body of thought within the cultural contexts that created it rather than as a comparative discipline. She believes a dedicated space is required where Indigenous scholars can push the boundaries of existing disciplines, identifying and questioning disciplinary practice and remaking field after field.  

Madison Hill
Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges 

Role: Madison is a Mohawk woman from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. In her role with the University of Waterloo, Madison provides curriculum development support, educational development, and consultation to the Faculty of Science and Faculty of Environment to implement Indigenous Knowledges into curriculum. Madison has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Management and a Master of Education from Western University in partnership with Six Nations Polytechnic. Her experiences as an Indigenous graduate student inform her work with the graduate programming at the Centre as she creates a parallel track of graduate course offerings from an Indigenous perspective.  

Current Area of Focus: Madison is a community builder who has strong connections in her own community at Six Nations. She connects faculty with specific research interests in discussions around the ethics of engagement and serves on grant and funding proposals that seek to move forward in the best ways possible for Indigenous communities. In any space she enters into, she fosters relationships with a clarity of purpose and enthusiasm that encourage collaboration. Madison is passionate about empowering Indigenous undergraduate students. She hopes to support the work of WISC and find ways to raise up student-led initiatives and voices that respond to the larger curriculum concerns of the university. 

Vision: Madison acts as a natural bridge to Six Nations Polytechnic as she works to create a strong pathway for future generations of Indigenous students to access higher education through their own spaces. As Madison is a third-generation survivor of residentials school, Madison she does not hold the Mohawk language. Another aspect of Madison’s vision is to foster the Mohawk Language program at Waterloo and further the university efforts in all Indigenous languages. 

Nahannee Schuitemaker [Click here for pronunciation] 
Educational Developer, Anti-Racist Pedagogies 

Role: Nahannee identifies herself within the intersection of three “I”s: Indigenous (Kanien’kehá:ka roots), immigrant (first generation Dutch); and invader (multi-generational French Canadian settlers). She uses this framework to speak to her unique perspective and to hold herself accountable in carrying out her work in an authentic way with a focus on the Indigenous experience of racism and locating it in the larger landscape of anti-racism work both within the university and beyond. 

Current Area of Focus: Nahannee is currently working with the School of Pharmacy to support curriculum development and integration of Indigenous topics across the undergraduate degree. She is co-designing a course on Culturally-Safe Patient Care as part of a broader digital learning strategy for other departments to build upon. 

Vision: Within the context of Indigenous Knowledges, Nahannee’s vision is to help centre and amplify knowledge carried and created by our youth, and also by those who are two spirit, queer, trans, non-binary, disabled, or otherwise underrepresented within the conversation of Indigenous Knowledges. This is to reinforce the understanding that not only is knowledge collectively held within communities by all, but that Indigenous cultures and their respective knowledges continue to grow, shift, and change in response to lived experiences and realities. This includes communities on reserve, within urban centres, and all spaces between and beyond. 

Jessica Rumboldt
Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges 

Role: Jessica is a biracial Mi’kmaq woman with roots in the Qalipu First Nation. At CTE, Jessica supports curriculum development, educational development, and consultations for the Faculties of Engineering and Mathematics. Additionally, she works to develop new faculty programming, Indigenous orientations in course design, and learning outcomes through Indigenous perspectives. Jessica also works with Elders’ circles and national communities on the larger strategic vision of what Indigenous education looks like. 

Current Area of Focus: Jessica is building a series of introductory circles on respecting protocols for elders and knowledge keepers. The series of circles will launch in Engineering for Elder Bill and include experiential and active teachings around offering tobacco, the preparation of heart and mind in approaching elders, understanding the Haudenosaunee principles of “the good mind,” and how to find a spiritual connection through education. Jessica comes to her role from graduate work in Indigenous homelessness, criminal justice, and public policy, and found an immediate connection to the work of Adam Ellis in Social and Legal studies at Waterloo. They are collaborating to launch the The Urban Arts Lab, a space to critically explore social issues that uses the urban arts as a mechanism to conduct cutting edge/socially engaged research that focuses on "street-related" issues; engage in decolonizing/student-centred learning; and provide training in decolonizing arts-based research. 

Vision: Jessica envisions a space that promotes relationship-building and meaningful engagement among the University of Waterloo, communities, and other post-secondary institutions. She hopes to develop an annual national conference for sharing best practices and resources for decolonization and Indigenization. 

Savannah Sloat
Manager, Indigenous Initiatives, Faculty of Science 

Role: Savanah has mixed ancestry with Lenape and Tuscarora family from the Six Nations of the Grand River as well as Scottish and British settlers in the Waterloo Region. Savannah is embedded within the Faculty of Science as Manager, Indigenous Initiatives and co-designs and works with the CTE’s IKAR team to develop action plans for the Indigenization of the Science curriculum, while also focusing on initiatives within the Faculty that enhance recruitment and retention strategies for Indigenous students and faculty and create an inclusive environment that integrates Indigenous knowledge and worldviews. Savannah completed a Master of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto where their research focused on Indigenous identity politics and relational kinship practices.  

Current Area of Focus: Savannah just completed a project that connects the Faculty of Science with the Ontario Science Centre in a discussion and exhibit that showcases forward-looking Indigenous Ingenuity and innovations, especially in relation to climate and environmental concerns.  

Vision: Building on the work of the Faculty of Science Indigenous Working Group, Savannah’s vision for this work is to create an open community space within the faculty for students, staff, and instructors to come together and engage in learning and place-making. Savannah hopes to support the creation of Indigenous science content to be included in all first-year curriculum, to provide land-based learning opportunities for science students, and to recruit future cohorts of Indigenous scientists. 

Seminar will explore health innovations at the Ottawa Hospital

A message from the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology and Health Initiatives (Office of Research).

You are invited to the seminar, Innovation at the Ottawa Hospital, presented by Dr. Alan J. Forster, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Quality Officer at the Ottawa Hospital, on Friday, December 16, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, in the William G. Davis Computer Research Centre, Room 1302 (DC 1302).

Dr. Forster will describe the motivations for change in healthcare and describe how the Ottawa Hospital is supporting transformation using three related concepts: learning systems, data democratization, and open innovation. At the foundation of these concepts is a need for strong leadership and trust to support the meaningful collaborations required to achieve meaningful impacts.

Your registration link.