Developing an Idea
In February 2024, ISSOTL issued a call for that year’s International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWGs) on the theme of “Reflecting and Reinvigorating: The Past, Present, and Future of ISSOTL.” A celebration of ISSOTL’s 20th anniversary, the goal of this ICWG was to explore the organization’s history through collaborative projects featuring scholars from across the globe. The would-be group facilitator responded to this call, motivated by two particular experiences and opportunities.
- The ICWGs presented a unique opportunity to contribute to the growing body of interviews conducted with SoTL scholars as a kind of living history. These interviews include the ISSOTL13 videos as well as the interviews with past ICWG members. The call for ICWG proposals seemed like a great opportunity to gather people’s perspectives on ISSOTL at a critical and historic moment in the organization’s evolution, two decades since its inception.
- At the time the call for ICWGs was released, the group facilitator was a student in the University of Saskatchewan’s SoTL Graduate Certificate, developed and coordinated by Dr. Melanie Hamilton. The readings completed as part of this program in SoTL 803: Reading Research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Dr. Andrea Webb encouraged further reflection and interest in the topics of belonging and academic identity in SoTL.
The proposal for this ICWG project aimed to bridge the opportunity for reflection presented by the theme of the writing groups with the ideas encountered in the SoTL certificate by investigating issues of belonging, inclusion, and academic identity within ISSOTL specifically. The overall goal was to think through the past, present, and future of ISSOTL through the lens of experiences of belonging within the organization.
Drs. Mandy Frake, Jennifer Friberg, and Claire Saunders acted as co-leads for the 2024 ICWG experience. Having approved the project and solicited proposals from interested potential group members, the co-leads selected a group of four international scholars to work on this project with the group facilitator.
The five group members are featured in the image below, taken at ISSOTL24 during our pre-conference work on our ICWG project. You can click on the image of each scholar to learn their current position and hear a bit about their scholarly work. For a more comprehensive description, you can click on the “more information'” buttons on the picture below to reveal their names and hear a brief description of their current positions and scholarly work. For a more comprehensive biography, you can visit our “Meet the Authors” section.
