Interview with FLC facilitator Hélène Nadeau

Below is an interview with Hélène Nadeau (Physics), Facilitator of Designing an Interdisciplinary Science Integrative Project Course, a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) taking place over the 2025-26 year at Dawson.

This FLC’s goal is to provide support to teachers interested in teaching the IP course, which is the capstone course of the new version of the Science program. The participants share ideas, develop activities, reflect on grading strategies, and collaborate on course planning.

What can your FLC offer participants that a department meeting or program committee meeting cannot offer? How is the dynamic different?

Hélène Nadeau: The FLC gave us the time and flexibility to really discuss issues that mattered, in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere. Members attended these meetings because of a genuine interest in the questions addressed and in what other members had to say about them. We had conversations with a lot of back and forth between several people.

Briefly describe what a typical get together looks like.

Hélène: Themes and questions of interest are shared ahead of time. We then meet in person for 90-120 minutes and address them. All along, we collect on a Miro board our thoughts, questions, resources, documents, diagrams, etc.

What’s one surprising learning experience that has come out of your sessions?

Hélène: This is not quite a surprising learning experience but a nice surprise that we shared during our sessions. This winter, we taught different flavours of a brand-new course. We expected mainly hurdles and that most of our meetings would be about finding solutions for them. In fact, most of us were surprised, and pleased, to discover how well the students reacted to the course. There was little absenteeism, the group dynamic was excellent, students’ presentations varied from good to great, the projects moved at the expected pace and communication in French, when applicable, was smooth.