It Starts With Us: ‘Rock the Boat’

Join us on Tuesday, October 25th for It Starts With Us: Rock the Boat.

Reimagining  Supervisory Relationships 


Join us on Tuesday, October 25th for It Starts With Us: Rock the Boat. Relevant to graduate students, staff, and faculty in supervisory relationships, this interactive event will illustrate the challenges that arise from the power dynamics inherent to supervisory relationships. The session will include watching videos of scenes of dramatic situations that can arise in supervisory relationships and discussing them in small groups. This session will prompt dialogue about how to foster healthy and respectful supervisory relationships and improve wellbeing for all while demonstrating a research-based theatre resource.

About Don’t Rock the Boat

Supervisory relationships are characterized by inherent power dynamics that make central issues related to inclusivity and diversity challenging to discuss. For learners, graduate students, staff, and faulty supervisory relationships can be a  contributing factor to anxiety, depression, and stress.

Rock the Boat is an open educational resource that uses Research-based Theatre (RbT). We hope audience members will leave the session with insights that will drive long-term behavioural and attitudinal change.

The session will highlight the interconnectedness of faculty, staff, learner and graduate student mental health/wellbeing. By experiencing a scene together, audience members can discuss sensitive issues in light of their shared experience, commenting on characters and situations rather than their own stories. Shifting the focus to these scripted scenes may decrease the psychological toll of engaging in dialogue and participants may also benefit from insight into how others experience such situations.

We will begin with an overview of our RbT project, Rock the Boat, and the principles underlying it. Participants will then watch a professionally acted and edited scene depicting tensions emerging during an interaction between a graduate student and their supervisor and participate in a facilitated, small group discussion about the scene.

The session will conclude with a debrief with participants about their perceptions of the experience of using theatre for this purpose. This debrief will focus on possible opportunities to implement this resource at an institutional level to generate systems level change aimed at mitigating the negative impact of these relationships on graduate students and faculty wellbeing.


Topic: It Starts With Us: Rock the Boat, Reimagining  Supervisory Relationships 

Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm PDT


What will I learn?

  • Develop an awareness of the equity and inclusion challenges inherent to supervisory relationships and their implications for  wellbeing. Consider ways to apply these insights to your supervisory relationships.
  • Develop an understanding of how Rock the Boat can effectively generate dialogue.
  • Identify opportunities for using the resource to support training and orientation around  supervision.