HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, Canada — I consider June 5, 2007 as one of my memorable days in Dalhousie University. It was a fine summer day. (Technically it is not yet summer but I am a Filipino, whenever I see and feel the sun, I call it summer!) The beautiful sun with its lukewarm temperament was ensued by the sweet breeze of the wind, which altogether gave me a sense of fulfilment. I have always wanted to graduate from my PhD studies. I cannot wait to finish my dissertation and graduate. I cannot wait to do other things beyond writing my thesis. I just want to graduate – and last June 5, I did graduate! Not yet from my PhD studies, but from the Certificate in University Teaching and Learning Program administered by the Center for Learning and Teaching (Dalhousie University). It was a remarkable feeling being with fellow doctoral students from various faculties. I remembered the sumptuous lunch we had, and the fun-learning stories we shared with our supervisors. (Oh I loved this moment because my adviser did not get the chance to ask me about my thesis!)
The moment when Suzanne handed me the certificate, I felt a deeper sense of meaning. PhD work is not an easy task, in fact the more I think of it the more it becomes difficult. But these apparent complexities generated an illusion of meaning. Having the certificate on my hand, I realized that not only I will forever be indebted to the CLT for keeping track of the development of my teaching and learning skills through the various seminars and workshops they offered, and the lovely course I took under the instruction of Lynn on university teaching and learning but more so, (blaming my sociological training for thinking this way), I will miss the many fellow graduate students I have known, some of whom became my very good friends.
[I have had this similar opportunity of knowing other graduate students from different departments during the 2004 Teaching Assistants/Part-time instructors CUPE strike days. (Oh those were good times!) I would have wanted to have another strike this year so that I would make some more friends from other departments but it did not happen.]
The certificate program, in my opinion, has become a good occasion to meet other graduate students from different departments of our university. Thus, having this certificate does not only mean that I have a proof of training on teaching and learning but more so, what I have is a certificate that bonds and bridges social relations – reflecting the immense social network that have been built through this certificate program.
In sociology, the concept that captures this dynamic is the term social capital.
One of its major theorists, Robert Putnam (2000) articulates two main components of this concept: bonding social capital and bridging social capital, constructs which were first developed by Ross Gitell and Avis Vidal (1998). “Bonding refers to the value assigned to social networks between homogeneous groups of people and Bridging refers to that of social networks between socially heterogeneous groups” (Putnam, 2000).
Playing with these social constructs, I am convinced that the CLT teaching certificate program is a social capital story for me. I consider myself as a lonely PhD student because I am the only cohort in my department. For the first four years, I have limited myself to the activities in our department. Of course I learned a lot from these interactions but the real world is not only about sociology. The real world is diverse and complex.
It was the bonding social capital that first worked for me, when a fellow PhD sociology student, Margaret, told me about this certificate program. She knows that I will like it and so, she encouraged me to register. Had it not for someone in my department telling me about this news, who took time in explaining its benefits; I would not have been interested in getting into this program, which requires “extra work”. So I guess, it is important that initially, there will be people from our respective departments who would encourage us to see that ‘learning how to learn’ and ‘teaching how to teach’ are essential features of our graduate life. By this paradigm, we can expect, to a certain degree, the birthing of the new generation of PhD students who are not expected to become boring lecturers or snob academics; whose primary interest is how to create what Fink (2003) calls as significant learning experiences. Thus, we become precursors of change in our respective department towards a creation of a new academic culture of teaching and learning. This mentoring dynamic will bond the very foundations of our disciplines between us, the future teachers and them, our future students.
On the other hand, in the process of fulfilling the requirements of this certificate program such as attendance to seminars, workshops and teaching conferences that make-up the professional development hours, as well as the one-term theory course, in my opinion, created a social network that bridged my sociological imagination with fellow social scientists, the engineers, the natural scientists, and the computer geeks inhabiting the various departments in our university. These training opportunities became occasions of articulating diverse thoughts and perspectives. I was exposed to the teaching strategies of biologists, chemists and engineers, as well as the learning preferences of those students taking their courses. I was able to give a share of my experience about teaching the social world, which to my surprise, was perceived as equally meaningful by my computer science and business management friends. Listening to these varying disciplinal perspectives allowed me to define my social space in the academic as well the practical world, in which I am constantly negotiating with.
Through the certificate program, my vision of the world has expanded because I did not only acquire a piece of paper but a piece of historical memory of the meaningful intersections I had with my fellow graduate students at Dalhousie University. Maybe in the future, I will find myself walking through the same bridge which was built through this training experience and who knows, I might come across old friends, and with our wrinkled eyes, we shall share the same laugh as I recall my old jokes. Oh yes, that will take me back to that lovely summer day when I received the certificate that bound and bridged my preliminary training on teaching and learning with the promise of becoming a sensible teacher and a life-long learner.
References
Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integration Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Gitell, R., & Vidal, A. (1998). Community Organising: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy. California: Thousand Oaks.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
