CRAWWLA Space

Welcome to CRAWWLA

Competence, Resilience, & Adaptability With & Without Learning Augmentation

CRAWWLA is a Taylor Teaching Scholars project, conducted under the auspices of the Office of Health and Medical Education Scholarship (OHMES).

This 3 year project started July 1st, 2016 and will run for 3 years.

Project Team:

  • Rachel Ellaway, Director OHMES, Dept of Community Health Sciences
  • David Topps, Director Rural CPD, Dept of Family Medicine
  • Michelle Cullen, Faculty of Nursing

Description and purpose of the proposed initiative

Description: this initiative will address the tacit dependence of learners and learning on the circumstances within which their learning takes place. The general assumption is that it is the learners’ intrinsic abilities that are being developed and then assessed in higher education but there is much to show that capability and competence is highly dependent on aspects of the contexts within which they are enacted. These contexts may be shared (such as learning environments or social networks) or personal (such as using mobile technologies). As a result there is little accommodation of these augmenting factors in contemporary teaching practice and therefore an apparent problem in assuring the capability and competence of learners at all levels of learner and complexity.

Our planned response is a series of consultations, discussions, and debates regarding these issues to explore how they are reflected in teaching and learning at the University of Calgary, principally but not exclusively focusing on professional schools and programs. We will then develop, deploy, and test a series of educational activities that teach and assess (both formatively and summatively) the competence of students with and without certain cognitive or performance prostheses, such as mobile devices, expert consultations, and basic facilities such as water or electricity. We will work with multiple education programs across the University to explore the applicability and impact of these approaches.

Purpose: to prepare our learners to adapt their professional capabilities and competence to changing circumstances, and unexpected adversity. By doing so we are helping Calgary students to adopt a more adaptable and robust approach to competency-based education so they will be better prepared to meet the current and future demands of the many changing domains of practice they will find themselves in.