Nancy's Note (November 2026)

I'll be home when you read this, but I'm writing from the Canadian prairies, surrounded by my scholarly community.  I'm in Saskatoon with longtime collaborators and friends, as well as folks I’m just getting to know, for the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). 

I came a few days early to co-facilitate one of ISSOTL's International Collaborative Writing Groups (ICWGs). Each year assembles a cohort of multiple ICWGs (see image right), and each group focuses on a different topic and convenes colleagues from different disciplines and countries—often strangers at the outset—to research and write together for about a year.  We began meeting virtually this summer and gathered in person here for the first time to move from idea to research and writing.

There’s something about doing this work here. 

• We spent the first day at the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for SoTL, which does more than support SoTL research: it offers a master’s degree in SoTL and North America’s only PhD in Education with a SoTL focus.  

• We spent our second day at Wanuskewin, a heritage site of Northern Plains Indigenous peoples. 

I’m struck by the decisions behind these two places.  One, to establish a center for research and graduate education devoted to postsecondary teaching and learning.  And second, to create a site dedicated to preserving and sharing the histories and living cultures of the indigenous people of the Canadian prairies.  

Both the Centre for SoTL and Wanuskewin are commitments expressed in buildings, staffing, funding, and opportunities to learn. They also name something about knowledge: it needs more than people with ideas.  Knowledge needs time, resources, and places where those people can work together, develop these ideas, and pass on what they know beyond themselves. 

These musings have me reflecting on TWU as a place of knowledge creation, curation, and sustaining.  What knowledge do we value and want to pass on—and what might we learn here that others have overlooked? At a university with a longstanding commitment to educating women—including women of color, first-generation students, and mothers pursuing degrees—those questions have particular significance.  What we can make possible at TWU when we invest in the knowledge our community is positioned to develop and share?  

SoTL offers one way to pursue that possibility: studying teaching and learning at TWU will improve our own practices and deepen understanding of students whose experiences are often obscured by aggregate data or generalized accounts of student learning. What are you noticing in your classroom, your lab, your Canvas sites, your Zoom sessions, or your office hours that others might need to understand, too? I’d love to think with you about how to give those observations the time, space, and attention they need to become knowledge—and pass that on.