Creating Teaching Champions: Taking the Graduate Teaching Experience Outside the Classroom

Teaching and learning (T&L) is considered an essential skill for graduate students (Rose, 2012). University T&L centres offer a range of workshops, seminars, and certificates, which allow students to engage with peers who are interested and enthusiastic about T&L and gain support for and confidence in their own teaching (Hughes, 2006). Still, there can be little opportunity for students to engage in more informal T&L dialogue within or outside of their department (Leger & Young, 2014). Through informal student feedback, the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at Dalhousie University identified this gap in graduate student T&L development, and created the Dalhousie CLT Champions in 2013.