Dr. Lorayne Robertson is an Associate Professor, former Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Education, and former Director of the Graduate Programs in Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). Her main Research areas include:
- Body image, critical health literacy
- Critical media literacy / digital literacies
- E-learning in K-12 and Higher Education
- Technology leadership in schools
Dr. Robertson offers research support to several national organizations in Canada who support girls' health including NEDIC, the national e-health repository for information on eating disorders. She is an advocate of critical body literacy which she defines as follows: "Critical body literacy is a set of skills and understandings related to health that can be gained by students and teachers if they are open to the notion that health means more than size and shape, and how health is defined and determined is constructed socially in ways far more complex than individual choice" (Robertson, 2013).
She was the primary investigator for a KNAER project, Mobilizing Key Body-Positive Health Literacy Curriculum Messages Grades 4 to 9. One of the ways Dr. Robertson's project mobilized knowledge was by creating a web site: teachbodyimage.org. The website has mini-lessons and short teaching units based on research on body image and critical body literacy (Robertson & Thomson, 2012), and it also provides research summaries to help teachers address body image in developmentally-appropriate ways, as well as a wealth of information for parents and teacher, which includes support materials designed to build protective and resilience in students to help them to resist societal pressures to match an unrealistic media ideal.
Digital technologies open new teaching and learning spaces in higher education but enthusiasm for innovation should be conservatively tempered with considerations of whether or not these spaces translate into more enabling student learning environments. Online learning, in itself, does not necessarily predict that students will more easily meet course outcomes or achieve understandings of key concepts. Nor does e-learning necessarily predict the presence of deeper, more critical, or more transformative types of learning in education. What is undisputed, however, is that the emergence of multiple e-learning spaces brings with it the potential to re-examine present pedagogies in higher education and reconsider these pedagogies in more deliberate ways. In this paper, one theory of online learning is used as a framework to examine possibilities for more enabling online learning environments. Within this structure, the concept of uncoverage as a pedagogical and assessment stance will be considered, as this curricular and program direction has emerged as a form of pedagogy for learners of all ages. Specific examples from the research literature where less visible but more deliberate and transformative pedagogies are being applied in higher learning will be considered including examples from the author’s current research. The findings suggest that it would be prudent to maintain an open, investigative stance toward the potential of e-learning environments as a catalyst for more deliberate pedagogies.
