Welcome to Teaching in Focus 2022!

“If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”
― Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life

Teaching in Focus is a pan-university conference that strives to provide a fertile terrain for informed conversations about teaching and learning, wherever and however we teach. Now, more than ever before, is the time to stop and take the pause that we so desperately need. We are only capable of teaching, supporting, leading, and developing our students and colleagues when we have capacity to do so.

This year's theme, Rest, Renew, Revitalize, calls on us to take a timeout, provide some much-needed self-care, and build personal capacity, with hopes for Revitalization of our teaching, where we give new vigour and energy to our practice. In the true spirit of collective Renewal, York University's Teaching Commons is also partnering with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Classroom Community of Practice to present the first Teaching the SDG’s Teach In conference showcasing an array of SDG-focused programming in advance of TiF 2022! We encourage you to visit our partners by clicking on the Pre-Conference Event tab at the top of the page.

Navigating our Event

In the TiF2022 Schedule tab, you will see that you have pre-recorded sessions you can browse at any time (all collated for your convenience in our Recorded Presentations tab) and parallel live sessions to choose from throughout the day.

Just a quick note: don't worry about whether an event is classified as 'Panel', 'Poster session', 'Other' etc. Due to the nature of our conference platform application from Fourwaves, we had a limited number and types of pre-assigned categories to work with, which may not always reflect the true nature of our events as opposed to a 'traditional' face-to-face conference. This is our first fully online Teaching in Focus Conference: we are still learning things, developing new tools and solutions, and trying to adjust to a new virtual world ourselves!

The only important distinction between the TiF2022 conference events is whether they are live or pre-recorded.

Live Sessions

In Welcome to my classroom, you will have the opportunity to listen to presenters as they offer a tour of their eClass environment, showcase a course activity, or talk about a technique, strategy, software application, or other pedagogical solution they have used. Some of these presentations focus on a teaching practice implemented in the virtual classroom that shows promise for future, post-pandemic teaching.

In Restorative practices I use in my teaching, presentations focus on restorative teaching practices your colleagues have implemented in their virtual classrooms. During this session, presenters will lead participants through their selected activity, and explain the practice/technique they are demonstrating, how it can be implemented in a virtual classroom, how it helped and supported their students, and how to adapt such practices in a face-to-face teaching environment.

Presentations in the Teaching in a time of exhaustion: Alternative forms of engagement stream share their teaching and learning experiences in alternative modes, and discuss their artefacts with conference attendees during assigned timeslots.

In AIF Featured Talks, Academic Innovation Fund grant recipients share the outcomes of their project.

Finally, Roundtable Discussions (live only) offer you the opportunity to share your perspective in free-floating environment without being constrained by a presentation format. Consider joining one of our roundtable discussions on any of the following topics:

Teaching while exhausted, how do we cope?
Building Capacity: Where do we go from here?
Managing students needs in a time of complete ambiguity
Alternative forms of assessment/new approaches to grading

Abstracts for all live events are available in the TiF Abstracts (Live Events) tab.

Pre-recorded presentations

Pre-recorded content is available in the TiF Recorded Presentations, as well as linked from the TiF2022 Schedule. The same presentation types described in the live presentations were created.

Abstracts for the pre-recorded presentations are included in their description in the TiF Recorded Presentations tab.

Networking & Chat

We also created a Chat & Coffee Zoom room (different links for different days) incorporated into our TiF2022 Schedule for your convenience. You are welcome to use it any time during the program to have a quick chat with your colleagues. Nothing formal, no obligations: bring your favourite beverage, network with others, come and go as you wish!

We are excited to share with you the best work of our colleagues and partners across all of York University, and looking forward to meeting you!