SCENT (Senate Committee on the Enhancement of Teaching) is back and ready for the Fall semester with a new theme “What is university for?” To explore this question our articles for the semester focus on four interrelated themes: the relationship between professors and students; learning and/or/vs assessment, grading, and credentialing; the role of the syllabus; and the changing university.

While an apparently simple question, considering “what is university for?” raises a number of complex issues and points to a range of tensions that currently affect our work as academic staff at this, or any, university. Clearly this question will be answered very differently by different audiences for it: faculty, students, administrators, parents, politicians, the broader community. Contemplating this question focuses our attention on both micro-moments of our academic lives (the syllabus, grading) and larger contexts within which we operate (university policies, life after graduation)--all of which force us to (re)consider what teaching is and does. This semester’s SCENT blog offers up a number of previously published short articles that range across these and other issues, raising provocative questions, challenging some of our taken-for-granted or simply unquestioned notions of what we do everyday, and always asking us to think more complexly about “what university is for”--and the consequences of how any of us answer that question. 

SCENT’s first blog post is titled “Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring”. This article is as provocative as the title suggests. It focuses on learning vs satisfaction and circles around SCENT’s theme for Fall semester “What is university for?” Find this short article and a new blog post each week at projects.upei.ca/scent. We are looking forward to lots of comments and discussion! 

For more information please contact Ann Braithwaite, Chair of SCENT, at abraithwaite@upei.ca or Gerald Wandio, Coordinator of the FDO, at gwandio@upei.ca.