Building Belonging and Engagement: Cultivating a Compassionate University | 9 February

Welcome back to all. Please join us for the first FFYE forum in 2021.

Topic: Building in belonging and engagement – cultivating the compassionate university

Academics, professional staff engaged in student transition and students are invited to register. For those of you who are new to the FFYE community, the Forums provide a space for academics, student support staff and students to network, share and engage in compassionate practices that support students as they transition through their degrees.

In this Forum, you will hear from students and an international guest speaker, as together we contemplate what it takes to build a compassionate university one practice at a time. With a specific focus on humanising online teaching and cultivating communities of learners in the blended environment, the Forum will introduce you to a range of practical strategies and resources you can use to create a hospitable and engaging learning environment that will help your students connect with you, with each other, and with their studies.

In this Forum, we are delighted to be joined by Associate Professor Maha Bali from the American University, Cairo, who is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (see Biography below). In her presentation on Building community online – sharing challenges & practices, Maha will introduce Equity Unbound’s collaboration with OneHE to develop globally sourced open educational resources for online community building: https://onehe.org/equity-unbound. In Maha’s session, participants will have an opportunity to try a community-building activity which will help them reflect on what building community online means to them, the challenges they face, and what they can learn from one another’s practices. Participants will also be encouraged to explore the community-building resources website: https://onehe.org/equity-unbound and ask the facilitators their burning questions.

Guest Speaker: Maha Bali, PhD is Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. Maha is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy, and editorial board member of Teaching in Higher Education, Online Learning Journal, Learning, Media and Technology, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education and Journal of Pedagogic Development. Maha is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org (a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences) and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum, which has also branched into academic community activities Continuity with Care and Socially Just Academia). She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education. She blogs regularly at http://blog.mahabali.me and tweets @bali_maha.

We hope to see you at our first exciting event of the year.