Season 5, Episode 6: Mary Trant, Jamie Zeppa, and Erin Dolmage, on their Award Winning Roundtables

About Today's Show

Welcome to episode 6, Season 5 of #SenecaProud Podcast!

In this episode, I speak with three professors who have created a regular, weekly online roundtable that has proven to be something quite special. Borne out of the need for connection we all felt during the COVID lockdowns, these weekly roundtables have become an opportunity for Seneca Faculty of the Arts to connect, share common experiences as educators, and simply hold space for each other, and for themselves, and as such have become tremendously popular.

In this episode we learn how the professors manage to do week after week, what they talk about, and how you might want to set up one such forum for your workplace, department, or for whatever group you have in mind.

And fun fact, our guests today are each bronze recipients of the CICan (Colleges and Institutes Canada) Leadership Excellence Award for Faculty as a result of the positive contribution their Roundtables have provided.

In this episode we also talk about:

1. The key difference between a meeting, and a Roundtable (ca you guess?)
2. How ChatGPT is impacting the teaching landscape
3. Best practices to help YOU can start your own weekly online Roundtable
4. Lots more!

About our Guests, Erin Dolmage, Mary Trant, Jamie Zeppa, and Erin Dolmage

Erin Dolmage is a Professor in the Seneca @York School of English and Liberal Studies, Faculty of Arts and a Ph.D. Candidate in History at York University in Toronto. She had done extensive work with the Métis in British Columbia, working with Elders and Family History researchers. She co-authored a chapter in the edited collection Contours of a People. She collaborated on "Bodies of Water, Not Bodies of Women: Canadian Media Images of the Idle No More Movement" in Active History. For Seneca Press, alongside her students, she collaborated on A Celebration of Indigenous Culture at Seneca. She was an editorial consultant on the book Two Dead White Men - Duncan Campbell Scott, Jacques Soustelle and the Failure of Indigenous Policy, 2022. Erin has been co-hosting a weekly roundtable for the Faculty of Arts alongside Mary Trant and Jamie Zeppa and has been acting as the Academic Integrity Chair for Seneca York King since 2022.

Mary Trant has been faculty at Seneca since 1990, and currently teaches General Education courses in the School of English and Liberal Studies at Newnham campus. Her favourite Gen.Ed. courses to teach are the Psychology of Creativity, the Psychology of Happiness, Group Dynamics, and Brain and Behaviour.

Jamie Zeppa has taught writing and literature at Seneca since 2004. During her time at the college, she worked with colleagues to develop curriculum for the University of Centra Asia. She also helped to develop COM 101, the composition course taken by most Seneca students, and is engaged in a research project assessing the transfer of writing skills from COM to other courses. Before Seneca, she worked as a freelance writer and editor and taught corporate communications. She has written a memoir (Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan) and a novel (Every Time We Say Goodbye), both published by Penguin Random House Canada.

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Thanks for listening!

Pat Perdue