Each semester at Queen’s, thousands of students take hundreds of courses in a sweeping array of disciplines at all levels, from the undergraduate to the doctoral. What unites this vast diversity of classes is a shared commitment by the instructors to pass on their expertise to students and help them develop new skills.

No one at Queen’s is better positioned to understand and help shape the university’s dedication to educating students than Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning Gavan Watson, who began his appointment in 2023. With the new academic year underway, the Queen’s Gazette connected with Vice-Provost Watson to learn more about his role, his plans to enhance teaching and learning at the university, and how he’s been working to address pressing issues like the rise of generative AI.

What is the role of the Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning at an institution like Queen’s that has such a large and varied educational landscape?

Ultimately, my role is to support the ongoing enhancement of the student learning experience and improve the teaching and learning culture of the university. I do this most often by focusing efforts at the institutional level: what policies are needed, what guidelines are missing, and what emergent issues related to teaching and learning require central coordination. More aspirationally, I also get to look around the province, country, and internationally at the scholarly work and innovative practices in teaching and learning and consider how these could be taken up here at Queen’s.

I arrived at Queen’s in April 2023, so I’ve been in the role for just over one year. In some ways, the amount of time I’ve been here has only allowed me to be reactive to emergent issues, such as responding to generative AI. On a proactive front, we launched Teaching and Learning Month this past May, which aimed to build on the many events offered during that month by units across campus and enhance institutional-level opportunities. To that end, we launched, within the Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning portfolio, the culminating experience of Teaching and Learning Month: a keynote on teaching and learning delivered by an invited expert, with the goal of inspiring continued enhancement of our teaching practices.

On a more personal front, I’ve tried to meet many people over the past year over a cup of coffee—from academic leaders to instructors and faculty known as teaching and learning champions. I’ve been trying to get a sense of what’s working at the institution and where there can be improvements to help me prioritize my efforts and lead work across the VPTL portfolio. I spend most of my time collaborating with senior academic leaders, primarily through Associate Deans, Teaching and Learning (or the faculty or school equivalent role), the staff within the Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning portfolio, including Quality Assessment staff in the Provost’s Office and staff in the Centre for Teaching and Learning. As chair of Senate Committee on Academic Developments and Procedures (SCADP) and Senate Cyclical Program Review Committee (SCPRC), I engage with Senators and other important stakeholders. Reflecting on my first year in the role, I want to keep working on reaching out more to students and faculty members with direct classroom experience.

What is your approach to creating change at the university? Are you developing an overarching strategy for teaching and learning or taking a more grassroots approach?

I don’t believe, and this may be a shock for an academic administrator to say, that another strategic plan focused on teaching and learning is the lever needed right now to facilitate meaningful change in our teaching and learning environment. But that doesn’t mean I’m standing still—my approach here has been more enzymatic. I look to hear what unit X is doing and then work to connect that unit with individual or program Y, who is also doing something similar. I also aim to “hop on” emergent opportunities brought forward by folks who believe addressing them will help make incremental but ultimately meaningful changes in our teaching and learning culture and students’ classroom experience. An example of this would be the work undertaken to improve classroom safety since last summer—we have added signage in classrooms and developed a policy to guide the posting of course information on public websites. While those may seem like relatively minor changes, they emerged out of consultation with stakeholders and were entirely within my purview to enact.

Since you’ve started, the rise of generative AI and its impact on students and faculty has been one of the major topics in higher education. How are you addressing AI in teaching and learning at Queen’s?

The most obvious action we’ve taken in relation to addressing AI in teaching and learning is the work that the SCADP sub-committee on academic integrity (which I also chair) undertook last summer to update the departures from academic integrity included in the university’s academic integrity procedures. This led to the approval of a new category of unauthorized content generation, which includes unauthorized generative AI use. 

Working with Dr. Kelley Packalen, the special advisor to the Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning on Academic Integrity, we have released guidance to academics on how to investigate suspected deviations from academic integrity that fall into the category of unauthorized content generation. Our focus to date has primarily been on understanding and addressing some of the threats to academic integrity that AI poses. 

Over the fall 2023 term, the Centre for Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with Queen’s Library, hosted a series of panels to explore the implications of AI on teaching and learning, as well as its implications more broadly. We also provided guidance on how faculty members and instructors can communicate with students about how (or how they don’t) want AI used in their courses.

With this in mind, the CTL offered a Generative AI in Assessments Institute this summer, which marks the next area of focus. Generative AI is a bit of a genie that cannot be put back into the bottle. We have students who want to graduate being able to use GenAI tools, and everyday tools like operating systems are directly embedding Generative AI. We now need to engage in the work of assessment redesign considering Generative AI and address what it means to study in various disciplines considering the expansion of these tools. This will mean different things to different disciplines.

My role here is to provide the space for these conversations and changes to occur. Perhaps to help the university articulate what its guiding principles are on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom. Most needed may be updating policy or working with collaborators, such as the CTL, to offer continuing professional development for instructors to help make these changes. Additionally, I am part of a group of Vice-Provosts, Teaching and Learning at U15 institutions. One item we will be discussing is how we can work together across the U15 to support the shared needs of our institutions in addressing what GenAI means to teaching and learning. Without promising too much, I imagine we would aim to pilot a cross-institutional initiative working with academics from the same department or cognate field across these universities to directly address the opportunities and challenges that GenAI has created.

Classroom experiences can be highly influenced by the physical spaces they occur in. Do you have a vision for teaching and learning spaces at Queen’s?

I’ve researched and presented on the role of design of learning spaces in shaping teaching practices. Faculty and instructors can facilitate, say, a group activity in a classroom with raked floors and fixed seating, but these design elements act as real physical barriers. Thoughtfully designed learning spaces can help reduce the friction faculty experience when adopting more engaging teaching techniques.

While we can be proud of the suite of active learning classrooms we have at Queen’s—the number of which makes us a leader in these spaces in Canadian higher education—I have also seen some of the less-than-stellar spaces we have. We have work to do there. More broadly, we know that in the case of our large-enrolment classes, we’re not running at ideal efficiency and are overbooked in these spaces. With curricular initiatives underway, like Smith Engineering’s transformative work in engineering education, I feel it’s an ideal time in this coming academic year to go beyond taking stock of the classroom spaces we have today and focus on what we want our learning spaces to look like in 10 years.

And notice I said learning spaces, because I want to emphasize that our students don’t just need access to thoughtfully designed classrooms, but also need access to spaces where they can collaborate, study, or do other innovative things to support their own learning processes. As such, I have struck a working group who will work this fall to develop an inspiring vision that will articulate and guide the future of teaching and learning spaces at the university. The development process will involve active engagement and consultations with stakeholders across the university and is expected to use an approach that allows for robust input and feedback.

I am undertaking this initiative to ensure that our teaching and learning spaces fully support and enhance the educational experience at Queen’s. As program curricula evolve and new teaching methods are adopted, it is crucial that our learning environments keep pace. So, back to the question—it’s not so much about what my vision is for our classrooms, but rather what our collective aspirations are for the future of learning here, and how our learning spaces can be designed, renovated, or, in some cases, built from scratch to help meet the university’s aspirations.

As mentioned earlier, you chair the Senate Committee on Academic Development and Procedures, which helps oversee academic planning at the university. What are some of the initiatives this group is working on?

While SCADP plays a central role in ensuring academic quality broadly speaking at the university, the item that I’m most excited about is a SCADP working group’s work on course classifications and definitions. This working group began its efforts earlier this year to develop clear and comprehensive definitions for the various types of courses offered at the university at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Definitions may sound boring — but I’d politely disagree. Definitions serve as a foundation for categorizing courses and guiding both students’ and instructors’ understanding of course delivery methods and teaching approaches. As we saw during the pandemic, when we don’t have agreed-upon approaches to course delivery, we spend a lot of unnecessary time correcting misconceptions.

Through this work, the working group aims to enhance the educational experience for both students and instructors by ensuring a more transparent understanding of course delivery methods and pedagogical approaches. This group has worked over the summer to draft these definitions of course components and modalities, with members of the university community directly invited to provide feedback on the first draft of these definitions. We expect the outcomes of this work to be brought back to SCADP this fall.