Life at SAIT
Jess Nicol is a settler working on Treaty 7 territory. Since early 2022, Jess has been an Educational Developer with SAIT. She enjoys working on building SAIT’s scholarly culture and providing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research support, facilitating foundational programming such as the Instructional Skills Workshop, Teaching Excellence Foundations, and Practical Applications of Teaching Online, and engaging in one-on-one coaching and collaboration with faculty colleagues.
Her topics of interest include inclusive teaching, decolonization, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), assessments, and ungrading.
Education
Jess holds a PhD (English and Creative Writing) from the University of Calgary. She is currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at the University of Saskatchewan.
Professional accomplishments
Jess is currently a member of the International Society of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) collaborative writing group investigating disciplinary journeys into SoTL scholarship.
She is also part of the Educational Developers Network of Alberta (EDNA) and was the co-founder of the national Early Career Educational Developers Group.
Other accomplishments include:
- Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Institutional Capacity-Building Grant, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Lesson Study Grant, University of Calgary Teaching and Learning Grants
- SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- University of Calgary Teaching Award for Graduate Assistants (Teaching)
- Students' Union Teaching Assistant Teaching Excellence Award
Research interests
- Scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)
- Scholarship of educational development (SoED)
- SoTL and the Humanities
- Archives and collections
- Hybrid genres and autofiction
- Objects and things
- Gender and narrative
Publications and presentations
- Johnston, S. L., & Nicol, J. (2023). Serendipitous synergies: Learning in capstone, COVID, and collaboration. League for Innovation in the Community College, Innovation Showcase. Learning Abstracts, April 2023, 26(4).
- Carter, J., Clarke, M.T., Halpern, F., Mason, D., Nicol, J., Vanek, M. (2022). Too close for context: Where students get stuck when close reading. Pedagogy 22(3). 349–371.
For creative publications, please contact Jess.
Oki, Âba wathtech, Danit'ada, Tawnshi, Hello.
SAIT is located on the traditional territories of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) and the people of Treaty 7 which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina and the Îyârhe Nakoda of Bearspaw, Chiniki and Goodstoney.
We are situated in an area the Blackfoot tribes traditionally called Moh’kinsstis, where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. We now call it the city of Calgary, which is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.