Faculty Learning Community Spotlight: ContEd With Care
Below is an interview with Felix Fuchs (English), facilitator of “ContEd with Care: Feedback Tools for Stress-Free Student Success,” a Faculty Learning Community taking place over the 2025-26 year at 爆料黑社. This community currently has space open for more participants. If you鈥檙e interested in joining, or would like more information, please contact Felix at ffuchs@dawsoncollege.qc.ca. If you鈥檇 like more information about starting a Faculty Learning Community of your own, please see the Call for Facilitators in the October 9 issue of the D-News, or reach out to FLC@dawsoncollege.qc.ca.
What can your FLC give participants that a workshop can鈥檛 achieve? What is unique or interesting about it?
The great thing about FLCs is the community. It’s one thing to work on your assignments and quite another to share your experiences with other teachers and professionals who are in the same situation as you. ContEd in particular has that challenge – along with the precarity and not knowing if a new contract will materialize – of feeling isolated from your department and other teachers. In my experience, it’s in this context that a lot of early career teachers burn out right away because they struggle with time management and workload. Just being able to talk with others about the challenges of the job and maybe getting some helpful advice in the process based on someone else’s experiences makes a big difference.
Briefly describe what participants could expect if they attend one of your sessions.
Beyond workshopping ideas for low-stakes assignments and time-sensitive feedback based on OAD resources, we’re currently preparing our first journal club that introduces our FLC members to texts that explore feedback from the perspective of Universal Design for Learning. In this way, we hope to ground our work in research-based strategies.
Can you describe one illuminating moment or edifying experience from your first meeting?
Right from the start, just sharing our struggles with student feedback opened up a few insights that changed our approach, like realizing for example that a crucial element in feedback is communication. That sounds quite obvious, but when you’re focused on designing assignments for skill development, it is easy to overlook that what makes sense to us in terms of rubrics and feedback might not be as clear for our students. We’ve benefitted from having members of the Learning Centre in our group who can give us a direct insight into our students鈥� experience with feedback.
And if I may, I would just like to take a moment to thank the members of the FLC – faculty from various disciplines, professionals from the Learning Centre, and Einat Idan from OAD – for their work and contributions so far.
