SOTL

Recent drives to modernise the mental health workforce have been led (in England) by initiatives such as New Ways of Working and informed by the Ten Essential Shared Capabilities (10 ESCs)
(Department of Health, 2004), reflected elsewhere in the UK. Learning materials have been developed to support these and educators encouraged to embed them within curricula. Yet, little  has been said about how such principles could or should apply to the practice of mental health educators themselves. Higher education plays a crucial part in shaping tomorrow’s practitioners; yet educators can receive scant mention when workforce
initiatives are launched. Here, then, we consider the 10 ESCs, examining how these might be put into practice in a higher education context. The pedagogic rationale for this perspective is discussed in terms of Biggs’ (2003) concept of ‘constructive
alignment’, Ward’s (1999) ‘matching principle’ and Eraut’s (1994) analysis of ‘professional education’. Reconceptualising higher education educators as a part (albeit semi-detached) of the mental health workforce may help us move beyond a ‘tick-box’
approach – exploring not only whether the 10 ESCs are reflected in the content of curricula, but how they are embodied within teaching teams.

Scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) scholars, including those who are not in formal positions of leadership, are uniqully positioned to engage in leadership activities that can grow the field, influence their colleagues, and effect change in their local contexts as well as in institutional, disciplinary, and the broader Canadian contexts. Drawing upon the existing SoTL literature and our own diverse experiences, we propose a framework that describes institutional contexts in terms of local SoTL activity (microcultures) and administrative support (macro-level) and use it to describe the many ways that SoTL scholars can and do “lead up” to effect change depending on their own context. We conclude by inviting scholars to consider, reflect upon, and experiment with their leadership activities, not only for their own professional growth but also to contribute to the literature in this area.

Les professeurs qui font des recherches dans le dom
aine de l’avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage (ACEA), y compris ceux qui n’occupent pas un poste de leadership formel, occupent une position unique pour s’engager dans des activités de leadership qui peuvent faire avancer le domaine,
influencer leurs collègues et effectuer des changements dans leurs contextes locaux ainsi que dans les contextes plus vastes de leur établissement, de leur discipline et du contexte canadien en général. En nous appuyant sur la documentation déjà publiée en ACEA et sur nos d
iverses expériences personnelles, nous proposons un cadre qui dé
crit les contextes institutionnels en termes d’activités d’ACEA locale
s (micro-cultures) et de soutien administratif (niveau macro) que nous utilisons pour décrire les diverses manières dontn les chercheurs en ACEA peuvent en arriver à effectuer des changements selon leur propre contexte. En conclusion, nous invitons les chercheurs à prendre en considération leurs activités de leadership, à y réfléchir et à faire des expériences, non seulement pour leur propre croissance professionnelle mais également pour contribuer à la documentation dans ce domaine.

Blended learning is an approach to teaching and learning that is being promoted at many universities involving an integration of learning technologies and face-to-face teaching. This paper outlines a strategy for promoting blended learning that involves identifying eTeaching and Learning scholars and providing them with possibilities for engaging their students in learning with technology. The strategy employs an action learning approach that utilises the knowledge and experiences of participants to address a common problem: In what ways and to what to extent can blended approaches support student learning?

Mental health educators, engaged in shaping tomorrow’s professionals, are faced with seismic change – both in mental health policy and practice and in the landscape of higher education. In teaching, as in practice, there are drives towards integrative thinking and interprofessional working, with a move to engage service users/survivors and carers as active partners. Most professional programmes are, however, delivered through academic and professional programmes that are uni-professional, in which institutional and attitudinal barriers to inclusive education may be significant. Moreover, many educators work in a climate
where research is prioritised over teaching, and where  opportunities to debate teaching, update practice and policy, or plan curricula in conjunction with others may be limited.
In this chapter we analyse this challenging context for educators and, drawing on the work of the Mental Health in Higher Education project (mhhe), explore how learning and teaching about mental health can be enhanced through increased networking and the
sharing of perspectives and ideas. The challenge for educators in this context is to allow themselves to become learners, working with colleagues from within their own discipline or profession, from other professions and disciplines, with practice colleagues and students, as well as alongside users of services/survivors and carers. The notion of linking and building communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) provides a conceptual basis for such development
and transformation.

In this paper we propose a new vision of educational development that reimagines how graduate instructors are socialized and professionalized in academic settings. We describe a Transgressive Learning Community (TLC) that empowers graduate instructors with tools to reveal, mitigate, and disrupt oppressive structures in higher education. Our learning community is founded on critical race and feminist conceptualizations of pedagogical inquiry in its design, implementation, and assessment to serve underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students. We argue that the intersections of marginalized and graduate student identities create distinct experiences of discrimination, marginalization, tokenism, isolation, and impostor syndrome due to a lack of sustained teaching mentorship within the academy. The Transgressive Learning Community model that we propose in this paper functions to create spaces of transgressive and transformational pedagogical engagement for graduate students who exist at the intersections of these identities