Welcome to our Appreciative Resilience Facilitators’ portfolio! The creation of this portfolio is our final step in becoming trained Appreciative Resilience Facilitators (following participation in an enlightening and through-provoking workshop series offered by Jeanie Cockell and Joan McArthur-Blair), but our first step in helping co-create with our colleagues a more resilient campus and student body.
We are Christina Cederlof and Carolyn Ives, faculty members at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). Thompson Rivers University campuses are on the traditional lands of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops campus) and the T’exelc (Williams Lake campus) within Secwépemc’ulucw, the traditional and unceded territory of the Secwépemc. TRU’s region also extends into the territories of the St’át’imc, Nlaka’pamux, Nuxalk, Tŝilhqot’in, Dakelh, and Syilx peoples.
As post-secondary educators, we wanted to implement strategies for engaging in Appreciative Resilience into our context and share with faculty ways they can help foster students’ resilience in the classroom–as well as their own resilience–through an Appreciative Resilience framework.
Part of the push to engage in this training was to better support faculty to support students as we are all emerging from lockdown into a new world. While there are some who would like things to return to “normal,” we recognize that there is no going back, that the campus and its community has been forever changed by world events, and we wanted to both acknowledge and honour that. We have witnessed faculty cycle through despair, forgiveness, and hope–all elements of the Appreciative Resilience Framework–and we sought to help faculty articulate this and validate their experiences, all while supporting them to engage with this framework in fostering student learning and success.
We’ll share more about ourselves in our reflections at this link, but here are our brief biographies:
Christina Cederlof is an Associate Teaching Professor with the Faculty of Education and Social Work at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). She teaches in the Education and Skills Training (ESTR) programs and has a proven record of accomplishment with program and curriculum development. She has fulfilled leadership roles with the provincial articulation committee, advised a steering committee for the Ministry of Advanced Education, is recognized as a leader in post-secondary programming for students with learning challenges and is currently program coordinator for the ESTR programs. She consistently evaluates and researches teaching methodology and technology to add to her practice. In addition to her scholarly teaching, she is actively engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and has disseminated her observations and conclusions to over 30 external conferences and workshops – eight of which were international – over the past ten years. Christina can be reached at ccederlof@tru.ca.
Carolyn Ives is a Coordinator, Learning and Faculty Development at the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). As a former faculty member in English at MacEwan University and in English and Modern Languages at TRU, Carolyn shifted to educational development work approximately 12 years ago, first through her role as Academic Integrity Officer, then Curriculum Planning and Development Coordinator, and then Interim Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE) at MacEwan. She works on and is curious about evidencing value of educational development work, curricular integration of sustainability, equity, and academic integrity; outcomes creation and assessment; the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL); and Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR). As a Métis and neurodiverse faculty member, she cares deeply about making space for multiple perspectives in learning spaces. She can be reached at cives@tru.ca.