The Teaching and Learning Innovation Digest - May 2023

RETURNING TO
(REFUSE) NORMAL
but learn from them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we create systems that are “antifragile”,
which are even better than resilient ones. They actually gain strength through chaos and crises”.
(Zakaria, 2021:26).
There’s a lot to unpack in that quote (and in the book) but the standout for me is the criticality of
learning. In Zakaria’s words, we live in a global and technological ecosystem that is “open, fast
– and thus, almost by definition, unstable” (Zakaria, 2021:14). We’ve viscerally experienced the
disruptions of continuous change, risk, volatility, and ambiguity and this is now elemental to our
shared context. Our re/TURN asks us to embrace experimentation, mistakes, and our own imperfect
humanity, through a bias for learning, sharing, and growing together. We emerge from crises and
chaos even stronger, more resilient, and “antifragile”.
So much has changed, and yet despite all that’s changed (including the “forever changes”)
in this post-pandemic era, the essence of our work and why it matters indisputably
endures. Contemplating what’s ahead might be daunting, maybe even scary, but it’s also
exhilarating. What a monumental privilege it is to be alive in this historic time and to have a part in
shaping what’s to come. We’re reaching into the future with every student, every graduate, every
class/lab-field-clinical-co-op placement/committee meeting, and with every moment of teamwork,
homework, and all the other extraordinary work we do. Just like the title of the powerfully relevant
Academic Plan that we forged together during an unforgettable 2020, we’re Building Leaders
and Changemakers!
References
Centennial College (2021). Academic Plan 2021-2025: Building Leaders and Changemakers.
https://www.centennialcollege.ca/about-centennial/college-overview/academic-plan-2021-2025
Dennis, M. (2022, September). Post-pandemic: Some ‘forever’ changes to higher education,
University World News.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220902154032439
Selingo, J.J. (2022, September). How the Pandemic Changed Higher Education, FutureEd, McCourt
School of Public Policy, Georgetown University.
https://www.future-ed.org/how-the-pandemic-changed-higher-education/
Zakaria, F. (2021). Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. New York: WW Norton and Co.
Dr. Cary DiPietro
Dean, Learning, Teaching and Scholarship,
Centre for Faculty Development and Teaching Innovation (CFDTI)
The theme of this year’s Teaching and
Learning Digest carries forward and builds
upon the theme of the Faculty Summit that was
held on June 3rd, 2022. The Summit was held
virtually, as, at the time, we were still emerging
from the fourth wave of the COVID-19 global
pandemic. Many of us were beginning to
experience a return to campus during the
early days of the hybrid work pilot. We were
reminded that many of our colleagues were
already, and had been, teaching on campus
through the pandemic following the brief full
closure of campus.
It was in the spirit of this disrupting of
assumptions about “returning” to campus that
the theme of the Summit was framed, as a
re/TURN, a framing intended to invoke a sense
of collective intervention and disruption of
the idea of returning to normal. The Summit
provided a way to engage our collective
knowledge and experiences, the lessons
learned, the hard work of developing different
approaches to teaching and learning on the
turn of a dime, and to pool together ideas and
strategies. It opened a space for reflection on
what it means to reengage with our students
and each other on campus, re/assembling,
re/connecting, re/working, re/imagining, and
re/thinking how we teach and how our students
learn. The Summit was an attempt to carry
forward a few of the productive affordances
of an otherwise tragic global pandemic, to
document what we learned, and to consider
how to put that into continued practice.
A more unsettling disruption of normalcy,
though, has resonated and continues to
resonate in and beyond our responses to the
COVID-19 pandemic. Resounding loudly in
moments such as the murder of George Floyd
in May, 2020 or the horrific discoveries of
unmarked graves at residential school sites
that continue across Canada. Shortly after
Floyd’s murder, the scholar and poet Dionne
Brand railed against the hypocrisy of the
collective desire to get back to normal in a
popular opinion piece for the Toronto Star,
noting, “I’ve developed an aversion to the
word normal…now I find it noxious” (Brand,
2022). For Brand, “normal” is a condition
of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism,
of violence against women and racialized
minorities, of homophobia, transphobia, and
white supremacy: who would want to get back
to that normal, Brand asks, “to sit in it restfully,
to mourn it, or to desire its continuance?”
The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar,
educator, writer, and artist Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson referenced Brand’s
column in MacLean’s a few months later,
noting that, while the Elders she worked with
told their people to “go to the land” during the
pandemic, returning to the land is difficult if
not impossible for many Indigenous people:
“In order to have a relationship to our territory
we have to navigate ignored treaty rights,
highways, provincial parks, farms, cottages
and cottagers, cities, subdivisions and now
parking lots, and trails full of pandemic hikers”
(Betasamosake Simpson, 2020). The article
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