Making Memorial Student-Ready: Reflections on the First Year Success Experience

In eleven short chapters faculty, academic advising staff and student union representatives discuss aspects of Memorial’s First Year Success Program (piloted as a Teaching Learning Framework initiative 2012-2017). Teaching approaches, curriculum content and policy rationales are covered in a broad view of how and why students identified as least likely to succeed at university can be academically supported. Contributors identify the singular importance of the community that First Year Success provided them and its student participants

Method in ecology : Bernard Lonergan and Catholic environmental ethics

The central question of this thesis explores what the thought of Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan may contribute to a Catholic perspective of environmental ethics. In comparison with secular environmental movements, Roman Catholicism has arrived relatively late on the scene to examine formally issues of specifically ecological import from either a theological or academic stance. Catholic ecotheology is still in its formation but offers much potential for effective collaboration among and between both Catholics and non-Catholics. As it stands, the great variety of issues at stake in environmental ethics calls for a multidisciplinary approach involving science, technology, politics, economics, law, education, philosophy, and religion. Finding common ground on which to discuss the issues and prioritize values proves difficult. This thesis explores ways that common ground may be sought both within Catholicism and in the broader secular sphere using Lonergan's three-fold notion of conversion (intellectual, moral, and religious conversion), his notions of the human good and collective responsibility, his method of self-appropriation, and his cognitional theory which claims invariance in the structure and process of knowing. Because the call for change, not just of social systems but also of hearts and minds, is a recurring theme in any environmental ethics, Lonergan's notion of conversion will be crucial to this exploration of common ground

Graduate Research Writing: A Pedagogy of Possibility

Graduates often find conceptualizing and writing long research projects an arduous alienating process. This paper1 describes a research writing intervention conducted at Memorial University in Newfoundland with two groups of graduate students (Engineering and Arts). One small part of the workshop was devoted to creative “sentence activities.” Our argument is that these creative activities contributed to re-connecting students to themselves as researchers/writers and to others in the group. The activities engaged students in language literally, metaphorically, and performatively

Breaking the barriers of research writing: Rethinking pedagogy for engineering graduate research

A key attribute for success in graduate studies is the ability to conduct research and to communicate research effectively. However, many researchers in engineering do not identify as writers, regarding research writing as the end product of a static template. Novice and experienced researchers alike encounter problems common to all writers such as writer’s block and procrastination, and struggle for clarity of thought and brevity of message. Conventional, skills-based support for research writing exists at many universities, but an interdisciplinary research team at Memorial University has been investigating more integrative and innovative ways to break down barriers to thinking and writing clearly about research, particularly for engineering graduate students. Using the lens of academic literacies, this paper presents “Thinking Creatively about Research,” a research project that developed and piloted a multi-day, co-curricular workshop for engineering graduate students at Memorial University. Preliminary findings indicate that the workshop pedagogy can transform student perspectives of research and writing