Publications

This dynamic collection of voices re-imagining and fostering curiosity, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking expands across Canada to include work from Namibia. From AI integration and digital literacy in professional programs of business and social work to music, social sciences, science, social psychology, and religious studies, this book showcases the many unique ways that Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) has transformed students into active investigators. Dive into chapters that explore communities of practice, student self and peer assessment, and navigation into real-world applications of IBL in public spaces, professional ethics and applications outside of academia. These real theories to practice stories, research-informed strategies, and transformative tools expand across disciplines. Perfect for new and experienced educators, facilitators, and academic leaders, this is your guide to student empowerment across higher education through self-directed learning that sticks. It’s not just about asking better questions, it’s about changing how we think, teach, and learn.

How do you develop students’ capacities as independent learners, build their confidence and motivation to identify their own research agendas, and facilitate their critical thinking and research skills for effectively exploring their chosen topic? Inquiry-based learning (IBL) offers a proven means to achieve these outcomes.IBL is a scaffolded learner-centered, student-led approach to inquiry whereby students progressively design and lead their own inquiry process, with support from the instructor. It’s a powerful pedagogical approach that you can progressively adopt, first adopting it as an activity in a course to develop you and your students’ comfort with the practice, right up to developing an entire course or program utilizing IBL. It offers varying levels of engagement as you and your students gain familiarity with the practice, from the instructor providing structured support, to formative guidance as students gain confidence, to a point where students become increasingly self-directed and independent and are supported by the review of student peers and validated by presentations of their work to the class. This pedagogy shifts the student/instructor relationship, with the former leading and the latter supporting. IBL is a flexible teaching and learning approach that be can progressively adopted and developed without a specific formula, and that positions students as co-constructors of knowledge, rather than passive recipients. It is student-driven, creates engagement, develops a curiosity mindset, promotes group learning that is collaborative rather than competitive, fosters metacognition, and builds confidence as students learn to deal with ambiguity and risk. Each chapter offers personal stories, vignettes, examples of practice, and discussions of issues. This book offers higher education instructors at any career stage and in any discipline, a realistic guide to incorporating curiosity and inquiry-based learning into their classrooms to promote long term knowledge creation and retention and life-wide learning.IBL is being increasingly adopted across the English-speaking world. Beyond its inherent capacity to promote independent learning, it offers a perfect foundation for preparing students for Signature Work and capstone courses; and is adaptable to small and large classes.

Find Book: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003446743

The essays in this collection are written by the 2025 cohort of 3M National Teaching Fellows. Established through a partnership between the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) and 3M Canada, the 3M National Fellowship is widely regarded as Canada’s most prestigious recognition of excellence in post-secondary teaching, innovation, and educational leadership.

Find Book: https:https://www.saskoer.ca/teachingattheedgeofintelligence/

This dynamic collection of voices re-imagining and fostering curiosity, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking expands across Canada to include work from Namibia. From AI integration and digital literacy in professional programs of business and social work to music, social sciences, science, social psychology, and religious studies, this book showcases the many unique ways that Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) has transformed students into active investigators. Dive into chapters that explore communities of practice, student self and peer assessment, and navigation into real-world applications of IBL in public spaces, professional ethics and applications outside of academia. These real theories to practice stories, research-informed strategies, and transformative tools expand across disciplines. Perfect for new and experienced educators, facilitators, and academic leaders, this is your guide to student empowerment across higher education through self-directed learning that sticks. It’s not just about asking better questions, it’s about changing how we think, teach, and learn.

This dynamic collection of voices re-imagining and fostering curiosity, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking expands across Canada to include work from Namibia. From AI integration and digital literacy in professional programs of business and social work to music, social sciences, science, social psychology, and religious studies, this book showcases the many unique ways that Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) has transformed students into active investigators. Dive into chapters that explore communities of practice, student self and peer assessment, and navigation into real-world applications of IBL in public spaces, professional ethics and applications outside of academia. These real theories to practice stories, research-informed strategies, and transformative tools expand across disciplines. Perfect for new and experienced educators, facilitators, and academic leaders, this is your guide to student empowerment across higher education through self-directed learning that sticks. It’s not just about asking better questions, it’s about changing how we think, teach, and learn.

Turning the Tide: Climate Change, Social Change, and Islandness is a new collection of essays published by Island Studies Press. The collection looks at the intersection of climate change and social change on islands. Authors from around the world (Aruba, Tokyo, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Malta, and PEI) contribute chapters on food security, local and Indigenous knowledge, policy, natural heritage management, and artistic practices as they relate to climate change, social change, and islandness.   

This interdisciplinary approach foregrounds island storytellers as they convey worldviews, knowledge, and cultural values, beliefs, and emotions that are often missing from climate change discourses. How are the effects of climate change and catastrophic weather experienced and narrated by islanders? What stories need to be told? How do local, traditional, and Indigenous knowledge practices facilitate the capacity to improvise, innovate, and adapt to volatile weather events? How do social relations on climate-stressed islands continue to flourish? How do governance structures and issues of sovereignty support and/or inhibit climate and social justice? 

This groundbreaking collection is co-edited by Jean Mitchell, professor in Anthropology and the UNESCO Chair in Island Studies and Sustainability at UPEI; Laurie Brinklow, poet and assistant professor in Island Studies at UPEI; Eric Mijts, a researcher, educator, and manager at the University of Aruba who focuses on sustainable development in small island states; and Anouk Mertens, the former project manager of the EU-funded SISSTEM Project, who has a particular interest in the intersection between sustainability and islandness.

It is well-documented throughout the available literature that trust, or a leap of faith, plays a key role in facilitating success in student learning. In this study, we attempted a rapid systematic review of relevant databases looking for studies that addressed developing and maintaining trust among students, between students and their professors, within higher education institutions, paying particular attention to inquiry-based learning practices where taking intellectual risks is key. Our efforts revealed that there are currently no empirical studies that link risk and trust in early engagement in higher education IBL (i.e., IBL-HE) classrooms. Though the ‘gold mine’ remained out of reach, our secondary review uncovered several important nuggets which confirmed our belief that this is an important area of future inquiry and allowed us to identify barriers to trust and note student fears. Further research is required to examine the factors that promote risk-taking and trust development and the relationship with early engagement in IBL-HE courses.

Find Article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2021.1955672

This qualitative constructivist grounded theory study of trust within inquiry-based learning in higher education (IBL-HE) environments examined the experiences of instructors and students through four focus groups and nine individual interviews. As the study purpose is to understand the development and maintenance of trust in IBL-HE classrooms, participants are experienced instructors, learners, and authors of IBL-HE from Canada, USA, New Zealand, and Ireland. We used face-to-face sessions and zoom sessions to facilitate the focus group experience, and telephone for the individual interviews to explore the following two research questions: (1) what does trust mean in a higher education IBL (IBL-HE) classroom; and, (2) how do those involved create and maintain it? Our findings are revealed through our Pedagogy of Trust in IBL-HE using 3 themes: (1) Creating an environment of negotiated mutuality; (2) Emerging relationship/community building; and, (3) Internalizing and applying a mindset shift. Each of these stages involved a different trust relationship: (1) Professor-Student; (2) Student-Student; and, (3) Student-Self. These findings provide evidence for IBL as a pedagogy of trust in higher education, and reinforce the need for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and the lifelong learning skills desired by contemporary employers.

Find Article: https://doi.org/10.11114/jets.v8i9.4929

“The Curiosity Project” encourages students to engage in intrinsically-motivated, inquiry-based
project learning, investigating topics that interest them and following them down long and often
winding roads, where U-turns, hidden side roads, and venturing off the map are a cause for
excitement not a distraction from the destination. These inquiry-based, semester-long, studentled projects incorporate proximal goals of weekly learning logs and peer group meetings and indepth feedback from peers and senior student facilitators. There are no page/word limits or
minimum/maximum number of resources, just students’ burgeoning sense of what constitutes
“high-quality work”. Community-oriented projects round out this experience. In this paper, I
outline the structure of “The Curiosity Project”, its theoretical underpinnings, and present both
quantitative and qualitative data that suggest that not only are the project’s basic goals being
met but that there are unexpected transformational properties stemming from student
engagement in this project.

Find Article: https://islandscholar.ca/sites/default/files/2024-12/ir_21194_pdf.pdf

While we start out in life intrinsically curious, at some point throughout our journey from childhood to
adulthood this curiosity begins to disappear (Berger, 2014; Lang, 2012). This is largely the result of
various barriers and challenges, which can inhibit our willingness to explore our world (e.g., Kashdan,
2009). While the existence of barriers to curiosity has been documented (e.g., academic pressures, fear
of failure), we have little insight into the lived experience of students’ struggling to learn more
independently. We, therefore, interviewed a group of third and fourth year undergraduates who had
completed two “Curiosity Projects”, once in second year and once in third/fourth year. In each
semester-long “Curiosity Project”, students chose their own topic, wrote ten weekly learning logs,
engaged in weekly small group discussions and online feedback, created a final “fair” project, and
reflected on their learning experience. The students we interviewed had also served as small group and
online learning facilitators for junior students in the project for at least one semester demonstrating
that they were deeply committed to the goal of independent, curiosity-driven learning. Analysis of these
interviews suggests that despite positive experiences in their first Curiosity Project, most of these highly
motivated students experienced unexpected challenges with knowledge/skill transfer. They differed,
however, in how they perceived these challenges, as speed bumps or roadblocks. The environmental,
personal and social pressures that impacted these perceptions and the students’ ability to overcome the
challenges they faced are the focus of this presentation.

Find Article: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/auts/index

https://teachmag.com/breathing-new-life-into-old-classroom-resources/

As higher education grapples with increased class sizes and evolving technological
landscapes, the need for scalable, effective feedback mechanisms has never been more pressing.
This qualitative study explores undergraduate student perceptions of generative AI (GenAI)
feedback versus peer feedback within a first-year introductory psychology sequence. Participants
experienced both feedback modalities—peer responses in Fall 2023 and AI-generated feedback
via the Stemble platform in Winter 2024. Using constructivist grounded theory, this research
uncovered three overarching insights: (1) students recognize both the potential and pitfalls of
peer feedback, often valuing social connection but struggling with inconsistency and lack of
depth; (2) GenAI feedback was praised for its immediacy and structure, though concerns
emerged around its impersonality, perceived limitations in creativity, and lack of learning
context; and (3) students advocated for a hybrid model that blends AI precision with the
relational benefits of human feedback. The findings highlight the importance of thoughtful
integration of AI tools in higher education, emphasizing the continued relevance of community,
trust, and learner agency in feedback ecosystems. This work contributes to the growing body of
literature on educational AI, offering potential implications for pedagogy, student engagement,
and the future of assessment design from the perspective of these PSYC 1010/1020 students.

Find Full Thesis: https://noahstriker.ca/portfolio/