The Maple League Teaching and Learning Committee warmly invites you to our next Maple League Hosts event: Enabling Inclusive Innovation: A Workplace Opportunity for Liberal Education Students with Dr. Thomas Carey, Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.

 

When: Wednesday, November 26th, 12:00-1:00pm(AT)

Where: Live on Zoom – Register here

 

Description: Innovative workplaces recognize the value of diverse ways of thinking and knowing within employee innovation teams. This creates the ideal "business case" for engaging the distinctive perspectives fostered in Liberal Arts and Science programs, provided that the students involved have experience in leveraging those perspectives to add distinctive value for innovation projects.

 

The nine contributing academic partners in our network come from a diverse set of institutional contexts and a broad set of disciplines (English, Business, Theatre & Performance, Engineering, Global Studies, Career Development, Theatre & Performance, Interdisciplinary Studies, Communication Arts).

Based on a shared set of Instructional Principles and award-winning online learning resources, each partner has crafted a distinctive Learning Design that fits their institutional strengths, needs and opportunities. Each also contributes to our shared pool of online learning resources. In 2024-25, nearly 900 students engaged with a sequence of innovation activities of progressively greater challenge, diversity, team size, risk and impact.

 

This progression provides a gentle on-ramp to build students' Identify, Self-Efficacy and Motivation for employee-led workplace innovation. All of these innovation projects can be carried out within our own "workplaces for learning" (although working learners in these courses always choose to do them in their own professional workplaces).

 

In 2024, we got our first data back from student work-integrated learning placements and we are now developing options for curricular WIL and paid industry placements , as well as further coursework to equip learners for careers as Innovation Catalysts (supporting workplace innovation amongst their fellow employees).

 

We invite Maple League institutions to join as contributing partners in our next stage of development, to further expand the depth and diversity of our expertise, learning designs and teaching contexts.

 

Bio: Tom Carey is co-founder of the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, which helps Canadian employers, employees and postsecondary institutions to advance human-centric work design and inclusive innovation in Canadian workplaces (i.e., SDG’s 8, 9 & 10). He is also a Research Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University’s Center for Math and Science Education, and an Executive in (virtual) Residence in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia).

 

In past academic lives, Tom was an award-winning interdisciplinary faculty member at the universities of Guelph and Waterloo, and served as director of two university teaching and learning centres and as Associate Vice-President for Learning Resources and Innovation. He has also advanced innovative teaching through senior positions at the provincial level in Ontario and B.C. and at the state-wide level in California, and as Visiting Senior Scholar in the Australian national teaching project on The Future of the B.A.

Tom's own B.A. was in Pure Math and Philosophy (Windsor) and was followed by a Ph.D. In Software Engineering (Waterloo).