STLR International Film Premiere Panel
And so, with that as a preview, um, it's my pleasure to move now, immediately into the panel portion. I will introduce each of our panelists individually as they begin their presentations, but to let you know - from Technological University Dublin we have Sandra Thompson, from Universidade Presbiterinana Mackenzie we have Dr. Jeanette Brunstein, and from California State University Monterrey Bay we have Dr. Corin Slown. And so, it's my pleasure now to introduce Sandra - Sandra Thompson - who is an experienced lecturer with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry with current academic research interests in the financial technology area. Sandra is skilled in management
and cost accounting, tax accounting, income tax, financial accounting, external audit, and international financial reporting standards. But we at UCO have a special relationship with Sandra and Technological University Dublin - as well as many other great colleagues there. Sandra there, at TU Dublin, teaches and has been instrumental in TU Dublin's adoption and implementation of STLR. So, it's my great pleasure to introduce Sandra to you. Thank you very much, Jeff. From my experiences working with the UCO crew - and with STLR - has been fantastic, and I suppose to tell as why we wanted to bring STLR to TU Dublin as to there has been a shift in demand from an industry of what the skills of what our graduates need. So, if we look at the world in an economic form, the 2020 records said that
there were ten emergent skills - seven of those skills was pliability skills - the soft skills. So we needed a way to ensure that our graduates can leave TU Dublin with those skills intact, and STLR allows us to do that through transformative learning. We met Jeff back in May 2018, so we have got great help. I call my colleagues in TU Dublin colleagues, but I also call my friends in UCO colleagues, so we have got a great working relationship. But I can really - I suppose it's - a lot of the skills that we are developing in a curriculum - we can put them in practice, using STLR. Okay, so STLR will give them the skills so that they can really reflect on what
they've learned within the curriculum, but will also give them the skills so that they can pair those lifelong learning skills into the workforce. A lot of the pliability skills like teamwork, leadership, critical thinking, and all of those skills come to develop through transformative learning and through reflective practice. So I suppose to tell you where we are now, well, we have over 1,000 students, and we want to enroll the whole university - which is 28,000 students across three campuses in Dublin. We have developed an IT platform which will help us - and that went live in September 2020. It will act as an enabler for us to spread STLR across the university. I suppose one word of advice from us and what we have learned is that it's really important to have everybody around from the very beginning - when we went over to Oklahoma to see how STLR worked, we couldn't get over the fact that STLR is integrated in every part of the University over there. We went down into different rooms and STLR is everywhere, and I think that is
really important factor for us - that when we come back to Dublin when we were going to implement it, we had IT around the table, we had finance, we had HR - which is human resource in Ireland, we had the president - really he's the president of the campus, he gave us really, really huge support because he could see the benefit of it. I think you need that top management support from the very beginning. As well as that lead student representatives - we had learning, teaching, and assessment, and a center advising us in the direction that we should be going with it. And I think it's important that it's pointed out to the students that they see the benefit from the very beginning, and we don't want students to see this as extra work. Because they're already
developing themselves from year 1 to year 4 - STLR firmly recognizes their development, the holistic development of the student. I hope I haven't run on too long - sorry Jeff. That's wonderful, Sandra. What we're going to do for each of our speakers is to allow attendees to type in some questions into the chat and I think the best way that this panel will work is we may take a few immediately after each panelist's presentation - but I'm assuming that we'll probably have the greatest number to kind of page through - if you will - at the end of all of the presentations. So, if you have questions about Technological University Dublin's implementation of STLR - or questions for Sandra - please type them into the chat, as well as following our other panelists. So Sandra, please send UCO's best wishes back to TU Dublin and all of the great people that we've had the very wonderful pleasure to meet when TU Dublin was so gracious to bring a small group of us there to do the first round of STLR faculty training and so forth. So, we were
delighted to provide some Oklahoma welcoming when you were here - but it was just wonderful, it was a delightful visit when we were there helping in the very early stages of your STLR launch. I will for sure Jeff, thank you. Surely. Well, what we'll do now is move to our second panelist. Dr. Jeanette Brunstein is provost for undergraduate education at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She's been a professor in Mackenzie University's College of Economics, Accounting, Business, and Marketing. And of particular note about Dr. Brunstein's research is her focus on sustainability and transformative learning. Jeanette has mentored numerous doctoral
students as part of her duties and is a global advocate and ambassador for transformative learning. We also have a delightful connection with Jeanette, because she spent a semester here - a fall semester in 2017 - doing research about sustainability and how STLR is a part of what we do here to help inculcate a sustainability ethos among our students and our graduates. So, we are delighted now to present Dr. Jeanette Brunstein. Thank you very much for introducing me, Jeff. It's a pleasure to be here talking to you all - with
people that are so interested in hard work to transform students' experiences. It's a very meaningful education of experiences. As Jeff told you, I am Jeanette Brunstein - I'm from Brazil, Sao Paulo - and I have been working at Mackenzie Prebiritan University for around 15 years. It's starting critical reflection and transformative learning towards sustainability. And also,
I'm coordinating research projects with federal finance to introduce TL and critical reflection in business school and advising a lot of doctoral students about the transformative learning. I have now a new position, as a provost for undergraduate students and I saw this as a huge opportunity to adopt STLR as a core educational policy in Brazil since it was wonderful what I saw when I was at UCO. I would like to - if you allow me - to share some slides here. Okay, can you see my presentation? Yeah? Oh, thank you very much.
Let me introduce Mackenzie - Mackenzie is a 150-year university with three campi. Around 40,000 students and more than 1,000 professors - most of them with master and doctoral degree. And we have 37 undergraduate courses and 12 graduate programs. So,
we have a lot of research areas - economics, governance, cultural, health, education, business, and a lot of undergraduate courses - philosophy, technology, business administration, engineer, and so on. And here are some pictures of the campus - for you to get an idea. 150 years university's first library - very, very beautiful. And a lot of the first engineering beauty. It's so very American university - the famous tile with bricks. Here it is actually more modern nowadays. The most important thing, I'm here with Jeff King in the Fall 2017 to do my post-doctorate, and I had an opportunity to be a part of the STLR training process. Seeing what you are doing. Wanting to work with professors to introduce STLR - and here I'm working at UCO. Very happy,
I was very happy when I was there. And all of the research turned up in an important publication about Organizing Reflection to Address Collective Dilemmas: Engaging Students and Professors with Sustainable Development in Higher Education. And it is important, not just because researchers around the world are looking at what we've done. But there is scientific validation about the importance of transformative learning to transform a mindset. We are not doing this
because we think it is important. We can validate scientifically what we are doing. And so, I became provost for undergraduated students education. And we started to adopt STLR - we called MACK STLR. Our version of the STLR program. First of all, we start creating space for organizing reflection
institutionally. And one of these initiatives was the implementation of reflective meetings with faculty that happen once in a week. And these meetings are becoming very popular among the professors. We made the webinar with Jeff king, Nalini, Sandra Thompson, Paul Dervan, and others in the semester opening to kick off the TL project institutionally. And it was very
important because it gives us credibility to start the process because around the world there is people doing the same with very success. And I create workgroups. We create our own set of roundings of discussions with all academic staff to decide the core competencies, or tenets, developing with the students - and we try to do this in a very bottom-up process. It has a collective construction because the professor has to identify themselves in the process of transformative learning. And we are now doing rounds of validation with specialists from inside and outside of the university - market representatives. So, the professor decided what would be the competencies,
we validate it with specialists, and now we are validating it with the market. So we have an ongoing process. And here - the webinar - we did it in the beginning of the semester; what will be the next step? So we will start our UCO STLR training - I hope this year, yet I don't know. We will start writing out educational policy around TL, and I hope next year - in the beginning of next year we will have our pilot experiences in entrepreneurship discipline that is transversal in UPM. So all students, from engineering, journalism, and business school can live these experiences of what does STLR is. So, thank you very much! We are in the beginning, but we are very, very excited about this experience.
Wonderful, thank you, and thanks for sharing the beautiful pictures, Jeanette. I will share a funny story about Jeanette's time here in UCO, and it's prompted because as I look out my window the ice has literally drooped the branches down and it may still be freezing outside - but on one particular day, Jeanette, who was staying across the street from our campus, and she always walked over to campus to work, it was one of those very, very cold, Oklahoma pre-winter days, and when Jeanette got here, she said to me she thought she was going to die walking over. We don't have this climate in Brazil. So we are very happy here at - in Oklahoma to see those lovely, warm pictures that you showed of your campus, Jeanette. Um, one of the things that um you had mentioned Jeanette, that came up were the reflective meetings that you have with faculty there at UCO. Can you explain a little bit more about what occurs - how the things that faculty talk
about - what you're trying to elicit as a result of those reflective conversations?
2021-09-03 16:40
