Daniella Sieukaran (she/her)

Following her passion for education from very early in life, Daniella Sieukaran has acquired 26 years of volunteer and work experience supporting and teaching students across the lifespan, of which the past 20 years has been in 7 post-secondary institutions in Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax. She has taught at the post-secondary level for the past 15 years, teaching courses in psychology, criminology, and research methods. She currently teaches in the Department of Psychology at Dalhousie University and Mount Saint Vincent University.

In her present role as Senior Educational Developer (Program Development) at Dalhousie, Daniella

provides strategic leadership for curriculum and educational development projects, and supports

academic unit leads through the lifecycle of their programs. Her portfolio also includes coaching

and supporting instructors to enhance their pedagogical approaches through innovative initiatives

such as the Resilient Classroom Series, an ongoing professional development workshop series for

instructors – entering its third year – that promotes the well-being of both instructors and students.

Daniella holds a Specialized Honours Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from York University. She

completed her graduate training in Child-Clinical/Developmental Psychology at Simon Fraser

University, with a secondary specialization in Legal/Forensic Psychology, and earning a Certificate

in University Teaching and Learning. In a previous career path, Daniella trained to be a clinical

psychologist, which included conducting 10 years of internationally renowned researchpredominantly in the field of eating disorders and body image, as well as clinical psychology, educational psychology, and with Indigenous populations. This background influences her evidence-based, humanistic, student-centered approach to teaching and learning. This philosophy ties to her unwavering commitment to foster learning environments where our students feel seen, valued, and empowered with learning experiences that act as both mirrors reflecting their experiences and windows introducing them to new perspectives.

Keynote: Making Invisible Work Visible: Shedding Light on the Emotional Labour of Teaching

Consider a time when you received negative news and then had to teach later that day or when you had a crying student sitting in front of you during your office hours.

Emotional labour involves controlling how you express your emotions to students, as well as how you help students manage their own emotional landscapes – all with the ultimate goal of fostering a safe and healthy learning environment. However, instructors aren’t usually trained nor recognized for this relational work. In addition, emotional labour can lead to lower job satisfaction and burnout (Humphrey, 2021), with university instructors being in the top ten professions most likely to experience burnout (Schaffner, 2023).

In this keynote, we will explore the connection between emotional labour of teaching and the conference theme: Connecting with Community, Self and, Place. Achieving the goal of connected teaching is only possible when instructors themselves are connected – to their own emotional lives, to environments that recognize and value relational work, and to communities of genuine mutual care.

We will begin with Connection to Self: An authentic connection with self is both what teaching often requires and what emotional labour can erode over time. We will consider the impacts of losing touch with one’s authentic self, and how self-awareness and reflective practice can help manage the emotional demands of teaching.
Connection to Place: We will philosophize how the spatial and embodied connections of the classroom, institution, and the post-pandemic “places” (e.g., working from home, teaching online) act as environments that either amplify or buffer the emotional labour of teaching.
Connection to Community: We will juxtaposition what an academic community that extracts emotional labour looks like compared to one that reciprocates and sustains it. We will reflect upon what peer solidarity and collective care looks like when we truly share the emotional load of teaching.

The keynote will serve as an invitation to reframe the common discussion of individual resilience toward collective responsibility, and practical starting points for using this reframing to build caring, sustainable, and connected teaching communities.

Workshop: The A’s to Z’s of Teaching Gen Z

Have you recently found yourself saying “Back in my day, students used to be like…” or “I just don’t understand students anymore!”? Generation Z is the largest cohort demographic on university campuses today. More than any other generation, this group of students has faced lightning-speed changes in society, and have been heavily “shaped by the advancement of technology, issues of violence, a volatile economy, and social justice movements” (Seemiller & Grace, 2017). This

session will help you adapt your teaching to better align with Gen Z’s unique motivations, goals, skill sets, and social concerns. You will learn about:

Common characteristics and learning preferences of Gen Z students.
Strategies to adapt your course design and assessments to better support and teach Gen Z students.

To help you take what you learn from this session to your classroom, we will brainstorm strategies to use in the Gen Z classroom. In addition, you will develop a preliminary plan for how you can adapt one student assessment or course design aspect to better suit your Gen Z students.

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