A PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Alberta and professional researcher with experience leading applied and academic research projects across sectors.
Recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral
: )
Upcoming Talks
Reflections from Student Leaders on Teaching & Pedagogical Development in Graduate Education
Evidence-Based Practice Presentation
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Ottawa, Canada | June 6-10
Centres for Teaching and Learning at many Canadian universities now offer interdisciplinary training designed to prepare students for their roles as teaching assistants and/or primary instructors. This training offers a valuable starting point for foundational learning in teaching and pedagogical development (TPD) in areas such as how to access university resources, how to design course components such as rubrics and learning outcomes, and how to understand university policies and procedures. Some go further to offer more advanced training like practicums, or opportunities to engage in scholarship on teaching and learning. However, we suggest that the interdisciplinary nature of this training tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to TPD that does not fully support the needs of graduate students. We suggest that offering discipline-specific training at the departmental level, as a core component of graduate programming, can build on this work by filling important gaps in graduate students’ professional development. We reflect on the work we have done as graduate student leaders to ignite change in our own department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. After extensive consultation, and with the support of our peers and senior colleagues, we organized the Teaching and Pedagogy in Political Science (TaPPS) working group. The TaPPS working group is now co-led by graduate students and senior faculty members who collaboratively develop resources and implement initiatives that respond to emergent and discipline-specific needs of graduate students. In our talk, we will share our experiences, offer practical strategies, share tools and resources, and speak to the importance of student leadership in enriching teaching and learning communities.
Presenters: Meagan Auer, Elise Sammons, and Dax D’Orazio
The Online Pivot: Reflections on Virtual Mentorship in Undergraduate Education
Evidence-Based Practice Presentation
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Ottawa, Canada | June 6-10
For two years, post-secondary institutions (PSIs) have been operating with campus closures and ensuring that studies can continue via remote learning. A burgeoning body of literature examines the experiences of students and instructors amidst what has been termed the “online pivot” (Adnan & Anwar, 2020; Agormedah et al., 2020; Baker, 2020; Boer, 2021; Hamdan et al., 2021; Hussein, 2020). We contribute to this work by sharing our experiences of leading the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Mentor Program (FAHSSMP) at the University of Windsor though this shift. The cornerstone of the FAHSSMP is Mentorship and Learning (ML), an interdisciplinary, senior level undergraduate course, that requires a service-learning internship in a first-year class. The FAHSSMP includes up to 100 mentors facilitating the learning of close to 800 students across 8 disciplines. Mentors facilitate small break-out groups in large first year courses within their home disciplines. They provide individual support and small-group interaction to connect first year students with course content, faculty, and community. With the help of mentors, first year students explore and apply the courses’ key concepts in critically reflective and collaborative learning environments, with a focus on developing discrete skills such as critical thinking, critical inquiry, and group facilitation. We will explore how the online pivot in Canadian higher education took shape in FAHSSMP, how it impacted undergraduate students’ experiences of peer mentorship, and what we learned about adapting a traditional face-to-face peer mentorship model to a virtual context. In doing so, we advance knowledge about the challenges and successes of traditional peer mentorship models in higher education.
Presenters: Tamsin Bacon, Tina Pugliese, Meagan Auer and Adam Mulcaster
Getting Straight to the News Source: Who Evaluates the Leadership Skills of Premiers in Canada and Australia?
Paper presentation
European Conference on Politics and Gender | July 6-8
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Who holds the power to evaluate politicians when they are being introduced to the public as leaders for the first time? One answer to this question for gendered mediation scholars is, unsurprisingly, the news media. Journalists, columnists, and other news writers are most often attributed with power to shape the news narrative. What has yet to be systematically investigated in gendered mediation scholarship is their use of sources. We analyze newspaper coverage of leadership traits for 22 newly elected women and men subnational government leaders (premiers) in Australia and Canada, 11 women and their immediate male predecessors. Two pairs of leadership traits found to dominate news coverage of premiers in the first week after their rise to office inform this study: strength/weakness and competence/incompetence. By accounting for the sources of evaluative content, including self-representations offered by premiers, we identify who is given the power to evaluate the capability of new leaders, how their testimony is integrated into news coverage, and the extent to which there is a gendered dynamic to this news practice.
Paper authors: Meagan Auer, Linda Trimble, Jennifer Curtin, Rissa Reist, Angelia Wagner, and V.K.G. Woodman
Past Talks
From University to Work: In the Life of a “Professional Student”
Guest Speaker
University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada
March 18, 2022
What is it like to be a PhD student today? Not only do we work full-time in our program of study, we are pressured to pursue professional development opportunities that make us competitive in both the academic and non-academic job markets. In this lecture, I share my journey to and through doctoral education as a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta.
Meagan Auer 