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In planning for this year’s Teaching Development Day, Sue Fostaty Young, Educational Developer and Program Manager at the Centre for Teaching and Learning, wanted to branch out and try something new.

That means a little bit of live theatre.

This year’s theme for TD Day, which will bring together 300-350 Queen’s educators for a day of discussion and instruction on Wednesday, Sept. 7, is nurturing inclusive cultures of teaching and learning. To help make the event more engaging and interactive Dr. Fostaty Young has called upon the acting skills of Branch Out Theatre, who will lead the opening plenary session.

The group will offer an original scene-based forum theatre play, adapted to highlight the day’s themes, addressing issues of diversity and inclusion in the classroom.

In the format, Branch Out Theatre’s actors will present various scenarios involving inclusion. Audience members will be able to stop the action, run down and replace one of the actors to provide their input.

“I’m pretty excited about this because we’ll actually get people physically involved,” Dr. Fostaty Young explains. “We like the idea of being able to rehearse inclusion in a supported, safe environment before having to do it when you’re a TA or a professor in a classroom on your own.”

Dr. Fostaty Young says that inclusion came to the forefront after she was involved in a research project looking into how international graduate students and postdocs are feeling around educational development. After speaking with Equity Office and the Accessibility Hub at Queen’s she realized the university could be doing a better job.

“We thought that TD day was a really good kickoff point to try to expand people’s notion of inclusivity and it just doesn’t involve physical accessibility but attitudinal accessibility, welcoming in,” she says. “Then we started to think what it would be like if each classroom could create their own culture of learning that’s respectful of all the cultures that are represented in that room at that time.”

Following the opening plenary there is a full schedule of sessions on such topics as active learning; preparing your first tutorial; improving classroom communication; and making online learning more accessible.

Teaching development Day is open to all educators at Queen’s University and there is no cost to attend.