Educational Developers Thinking Allowed - A Resource for All Educators
By Celia Popovic and Fiona Smart
A new resource aimed at early career educational developers, yet is filled with information for anyone interested in teaching and learning in higher education.
The video post below spends a few minutes discussing this new resource by highlighting a couple of the sections and explaining why this is useful for anyone interested in teaching and learning in higher education.
After watching the video, click here to visit the site!
Click here to download a copy of the transcript for this video.
About the Authors
Dr. Celia Popovic, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, York University
Celia has enjoyed a long and varied career in educational development in the UK and Canada. After three decades as an Educational Developer and scholar in the UK, she moved to Canada in 2011. She was the founding Director of the Teaching Commons at York University which she developed and built before transitioning to her current role in 2019 as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education. She has held positions in the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC) as well as Chair of the Consortia of Ontario Educational Developers (COED).
As Professor in the Faculty of Education she teaches on the Graduate and Undergraduate programs, supervises Master and Doctoral students and engages in research in Post Secondary Education (PSE). Her recent publications include “Learning from Academic Conferences”, (Sense, 2018) which she edited, and part authored. As Vice Chair Conferences with EDC she led the design and delivery of their first online conference in 2019. As a result, she has been widely consulted on the logistics of online conferences in the context of the current pandemic.
Throughout her career Celia has taken a close interest in the support and development of educational developers. She has led the design and delivery of several courses for new developers, run and contributed to several EDC Institutes for Educational Developers and redesigned and taught the SEDA course Supporting and Leading Educational Change for several years.
Dr. Fiona Smart, PFHEA
Dr. Smart is the Head of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, UK and undertakes consultancy work for Advance HE in the UK and internationally. She is particularly interested in curriculum design at Masters level and for Undergraduate provision focused on enabling active learning and critical thinking.
More widely in the Scottish community, until May 2020 Fiona was the Convenor of the Scottish Higher Education Developers (SHED) group, a community of practice which brings together the 19 Universities in Scotland to explore and develop the role of the educational developer, a recognised challenge because of the gendered nature of this area of professional practice. Under her stewardship, she ensured that SHED has thrived through its international connections, building relationships and sharing expertise with Northern Ireland, Canada and China.
Fiona is active in the Scottish Principal Fellow Network and is the architect of its mission statement. In addition to her enduring commitment to higher education because of its ability to effect change for individuals and communities, she has a particular interest in arts-based pedagogy and has developed an innovative approach which enables group reflection and learning called poetic transcription with a twist. She remains a nurse registrant.