Join us for the Brave Conversations Speaker Series: Season 3, Session 2 - April 20, 2026
AnneMarie Dorland
Dear colleagues,
Please join us as we host Season 3 of Brave Conversations in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. This series is a collaboration with University of Calgary's Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, where we bring together an international slate of scholars to discuss ideas at SoTL's edges. This season explores the many ways that risk can be understood, taken up, and experienced by those engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
Risk-taking is often framed in celebratory terms — entrepreneurial, innovative, bold. While this can be a positive rendering, we want to trouble that familiar narrative. What might open up if we invited our community to think about risk in more pluralistic, more nuanced ways? How might our understanding of risk-taking, innovation, and failure in SoTL change when we look through an intersectional lens? What if we centred the lived experiences of those for whom “taking a risk” is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but something that carries real professional, personal, or emotional stakes?
For this second event of our three-part online series, Dr. Natasha Kenny, Dr. Alyssa Counsell and Dr. Jen Boman will discuss the role of failure in our work, in our leadership and in our scholarship.
Brave Conversations - Season 3, Session 2: What Happens If We Fail?
April 20, 2026 (10:00 AM MST)
If taking risks assumes the possibility of failure, how do we respond when things don’t work? How might we create institutional climates that embrace failure as a necessary part of advancing teaching and learning? In what ways does failure connect back to care — care for ourselves, care for our colleagues, care for our students? This session explores failure not as an endpoint but as an essential part of the creative and intellectual process, asking what it would take to normalize and even value failure within our SoTL ecosystems.
Register now to receive the Zoom link for this online session!
