2010 Teaching Excellence Award Recipients |
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| Gosha Zywno Engineering, Architecture and Science | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
Steven Gedeon Ted Rogers School of Business Management | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
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| Paul Moore Arts | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
Andrea Noack Arts | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
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| Tetyana Antimirova Engineering, Architecture and Science | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
Mitu Singupta Arts | Citation | |
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| Robert Teigrob Arts | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
Ann Rauhala Communication & Design | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
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| Soosan Beheshti Engineering, Architecture and Science | Citation | |
Peter Strahlendorf Community Services | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
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| David Miller Chang School | Citation | |
Dave Valliere Ted Rogers School of Business Management | Citation | Teaching Philosophy | |
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| Ken Grant Ted Rogers School of Business Management | Citation | |
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Gosha Zywno – Chancellor's Award of Distinction
Throughout her career, Gosha has held a passion and commitment to teaching and learning. She is internationally recognized, widely published and in demand as a speaker on the topic of pedagogy. She has received numerous awards recognizing her excellence in teaching in the 28 years she has spent at Ryerson University, including the IEEE Professor of the Year award in 2005 and 2009, as elected by students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Gosha is the only Ryerson faculty member to have received the prestigious 3M Teaching Fellowship.
Steven Gedeon – President's Award for Teaching
Steven A. Gedeon, PhD (MIT), MBA, PEng is a professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy at the Ted Rogers School of Management. He has founded or led over a dozen private, public, venture capital and non-profit organizations; published over 100 articles, reports and patents; and delivered over 50 public speaking engagements and on-line videos on personal leadership, motivation, entrepreneurship and teaching. Steve has dedicated an enormous amount of passion and personal time to student success and excellence, including four extremely successful student-directed projects at Ryerson: Students in Free Enterprise (the largest SIFE team in Canada); the Digital Media Zone; the Ryerson Angel Network; and the Ryerson Entrepreneur Institute (Canada's only student-run entrepreneurship centre). He has won over 20 awards including the Ryerson Experiential Teaching Award and the USASBE National Award for Entrepreneurial Experiential Education Practices. He continues to encourage his students to excel academically through hands-on experience.
Steven Gedeon – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Entrepreneurship is fundamental to the human spirit. It is fundamentally about belief in yourself, your ability to create positive change, and your capacity to inspire others. It is about connecting deeply with reality - to see things that others miss and to go beyond what is to what can be. It is about starting with nothing but your own mind and creating dramatic new values that never previously existed. Entrepreneurship is the most empowering, creative, freedom-loving power in the world.
Entrepreneurship is more than a business discipline. It is a core way of seeing, thinking and being that is relevant to all disciplines, all faculties, and all people.
Learning entrepreneurship is like learning to play the guitar. You cannot learn to play the guitar by merely reading books or watching others do it. You need to play it till your fingers grow calluses. Great guitarists have a song in their hearts that they want to share with others. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally an experiential learning process.
My philosophy of experiential learning is based on constructionism and the theories of situated learning and cognitive apprenticeship. My teaching philosophy is also informed by metaphysics, epistemology, the nature of human consciousness and the means for acquiring and transferring knowledge. The components of my teaching philosophy include:
Objective Reality - There is an objective reality outside of the teacher and student and our mission is to work together to understand it and take actions within that reality to achieve our goals. By situating the learning within important real-world situations, students learn better, work harder, and see the real consequences of their actions. Since each situation is unique, teacher and student must work together to discover the appropriate analysis tools, concepts, strategies, actions and outcome measures.
Volition - The student must choose whether or not to engage in the hard work required to learn. The teacher must thus constantly motivate the student either by ensuring that the situation has an inherent important value to the student or by ensuring that the student clearly understands how the application of focused effort will lead to positive personal outcomes.
Limited Consciousness - A human consciousness cannot grasp all aspects of reality simultaneously. We need tools for unit reduction. The formation and use of concepts serves to reduce the number of units to be grasped at any one moment and provides a specific means for acquiring and transferring knowledge. There are three foundational thinking tools and skills that I focus on:
- Analysis (Essentialization) - in order to reduce the number of units, teacher and student must be able to pare away the minor details and articulate the essentials relevant to a situation. For example, instead of calculating 37 financial ratios or compiling HR surveys, we must discover the essential points such as "the company is in financial distress" or "the poorly-defined org structure leads to lack of role clarity". Reality is complex: we cannot hope to understand all the issues in a business if we cannot first discover and articulate the most essential ones.
- Synthesis (Principle Formation) - the number of units may also be reduced by combining essential issues into one higher level principle. For example, the company may be in financial distress, customers may be leaving, and a new competitor may emerge. A synthesis of all this information might be "the company needs a new product development strategy".
- Integration (Action) - it is not enough just to create a new strategy or plan. There may be many implementation issues arising out of the company-wide integration of the new plan. Student and teacher must discover the concrete actions (tasks, milestones, responsibilities...) required in the situation in order to assess whether or not the desired outcomes can be achieved in reality. Students may also frequently learn more from their implementation failures than from business theories.
Most of my experiential learning is situated within an organizational context such as a company or non-profit organization. Students must perform an external market analysis and internal company competency analysis using a variety of tools and articulate the essential issues the company is facing. These facts of reality drive the company vision and mission. The students must synthesize these into the company's strategy which in turn drives the implementation of the strategic plan into the actions of all employees.
Students often struggle to grasp how this all fits together within an organizational context, unless they are actively situated within the organization itself.
An excellent pedagogical tool is to show the analogy between the company and the individual student. Each student must analyze his or her own reality and face up to his or her own personal strengths and weaknesses. Students learn many analysis tools to discover their aptitudes, interests and learning styles. They learn how to discover and articulate their own personal values and beliefs and to synthesize these into their own personal SMART goals. Just as a company's strategic plan is a blueprint for how to achieve its desired outcomes, so too an individual's goals drive the actions necessary to achieve their desires. Finally, students learn how to integrate their goals into every aspect of their daily actions whether those goals be character related goals of integrity and honesty or weight reduction goals that demand they modify their eating habits and lifestyle choices.
The hierarchy of principles shown above also helps describe my teaching psychology which is predominantly influenced by goal-setting theory and supported by valence-instrumentality-expectancy theory and socio-cognitive theory. In essence, these state that student performance is heavily driven by the goals that students set for themselves. Higher goals yield higher performance. Low goals or no goals yield poor performance. Goals set jointly by students in collaboration with their teachers and supported by the proper instrumentality and expectancy frameworks should consistently lead to exceptional performance.
This exceptional performance is precisely what I attempt to achieve with every student.
I work collaboratively with my students to help them set extremely high goals. I then work closely with them within the situated learning context to integrate these goals into every action in order to achieve their desired performance. I extensively use peer feedback in many team-based formats to augment my own feedback.
My personal teaching goals, driven by my teaching philosophy, are as follows:
- I continuously strive for personal improvement and teaching excellence. I read over 40 books a year and have read over a hundred books on philosophy, goal-setting, and psychology as well as books from the motivational and coaching experts. I have at least 2 extensive feedback sessions in every semester course and my SIFE team and work-study students engage in extensive feedback sessions.
- I teach "around the cycle" to address all the primary learning styles. I make the standardized learning style inventories available to my students and point out when I am teaching to different styles.
- I am inspirational and motivate all the time. I continuously emphasize the integration between the learning situation and the students' personal values and goals. I help my students set great goals and achieve exceptional outcomes.
- I integrate personal success, goal-setting, and time management skills into every learning opportunity. I teach life skills first and business skills second.
- I form supportive relationships with my students and make myself readily available. I "turn off the noise of my own personal life" so that I may focus my full and absolute attention on those I meet. I invest time with my students.
- I strive for transformative relationships. My students stay in touch with me after graduation and some invite me to their weddings. Several hundred students have invited me to be their Friends on Facebook and I always accept the invitation.
- I contribute back to my colleagues, faculty and fellow academics. When I go to a conference, I make a formal presentation on what I have learned when I return. I publish peer-reviewed articles on teaching. I typically make over 20 professional speaking presentations, public workshops and guest lectures per year outside of my normal teaching. I have written, produced and "starred" in over a dozen on-line educational videos on entrepreneurship.
Paul Moore and Andrea Noack – Provost's Experiential Teaching Award
Paul Moore and Andrea Noack have developed experiential service learning as key components of the methodology and capstone courses in the Sociology B.A. curriculum. Through their efforts, experiential learning is fully integrated into the foundation of the program. Their courses incorporate first-hand experience, learning through trial and error and community engagement, as well as reflection and judgment, a rare approach to teaching research methods and statistics. Their collaborative efforts have led Sociology students to experience personal, applied activities as fundamental to learning.
Paul Moore and Andrea Noack – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
We share an understanding of teaching that, unsurprisingly, is built around collaboration: amongst colleagues and peers, between instructors and students, and amongst students themselves. Our coordination of experiential learning across the Sociology curriculum is successful, in part, because we largely share an approach to teaching that has an intentional goal of professional independence for students; incorporates a reflective understanding of knowledge; integrates theoretical knowledge and technical skill with personal experience; iterates these principles across a curriculum; and ultimately has students engage with statistics as a 'craft skill' and a professional practice. This framework reflects the model developed in the May 2006 Report to the Provost on Experiential Learning at Ryerson.
Intentionality - Our overall approach is to mentor students toward independence as researchers: observers, readers, interpreters, writers, and producers of knowledge. We conceptualize all of our teaching as collegial, if in a future or hypothetical sense. The aim of teaching is to see peers emerge out of students. Students' ability to surprise us with new and interesting ideas and approaches to complex issues is there from the start, and emerges as they develop confidence in us as teachers and themselves as researchers.
Reflection - One of the ways confidence is nurtured is through reflection within an experiential approach to learning. Our design for undergraduate courses in research methodology includes independent research, combining comprehensive observations and reading with interpretive nuance in writing the essay or report. In the classroom, we model reflexive approaches to research and prompt students to do the same throughout their projects. When students understand how 'scientific knowledge' is produced and validated, they are better able to understand and critically assess more of the material that they encounter.
Integration - In coordinating our teaching of statistics, we strive to bring potentially dry numbers and formulas to life by linking them to meaningful elements of students' lives. For example, in Noack's course, students investigate the effect of a having university degree on future wages, and in Moore's course, a more complex model is used to estimate the effect of having a social science degree, relative to other disciplines. We also strive to disrupt the 'truth' that many students perceive in quantitative or statistical reports by encouraging them to understand these facts as a cultural production.
Iteration - This approach needs sustained, iterative reinforcement-it must be instituted as a curriculum, not just a series of courses. Our teaching philosophy puts collaboration at the centre, even as we maintain responsibility and independence in our individual classrooms: this is not team teaching; this is integrated, sustained cooperation between two professors. The success of our approach is evident on a daily basis in that students often treat us as interchangeable, dropping in to ask the one a question if the other is not in the office at the time. We also encourage our students to collaborate with each other - again, this is not simply groupwork, but a more sustained form of peer mentoring, discussion, and sharing of ideas, advice and results.
Engagement - A key component of teaching the production of quantitative knowledge is conceiving of statistical analysis as a 'craft skill' that can only be learned through experience. Much as a student cannot become a good painter by reading a book about painting techniques; a student cannot become a good social statistician by reading a book about statistical techniques. In contrast to the idea of statistics as a mechanical practice, statistical modeling is treated as a nuanced, complex skill that is shaped by practical limitations and sociological ideas about how the world works. In our courses, students are actively engaged in the practice of creating knowledge, and thus they are motivated to learn and to succeed. The applied knowledge that students gain through this approach is not just practical, it is integral to what makes the knowledge gained truly sociological, in that students reflexively recognize their own power in continually creating and re-creating knowledge.
These five ideas inform our overall approach to teaching and the initiatives we have developed.
In our statistics classes, we provide Service Learning opportunities that allow students to link their learning of quantitative analysis to everyday experience and practical problems. Students build math and statistical confidence in their introductory course by teaching data management to primary school students in an inner-city school. Then, in an advanced statistics course, students conduct original data analysis by designing and analyzing multiple-regression results from Statistics Canada dataset, collaborating to meet the research needs of a community partner.
In further methodology courses, students learn the techniques of questionnaires by composing, testing, conducting and analyzing the results of a survey of their own design; Service Learning students do this, again, working to meet the evaluation needs of a community program. In a capstone course, senior students have an opportunity to develop program evaluation skills by mentoring third-year students as consultants and knowledge brokers, providing workshops and reviewing reports-in-progress.
Finally, with the support of the Faculty of Arts, our Sociology Statistics Peer Mentor program provides another opportunity for experiential learning. In this pilot project, several senior students act as statistics peer mentors, scheduling drop-in time when junior students can get help, and assisting during the labs of the statistics courses.
Each of these Service Learning elements is ongoing, but together they have already become an integral part of the Sociology curriculum. For all students, experiential learning is enriched through collaborating on real life, real time decision-making and research-based problem solving. Altogether, this reflects our approach to the practice of arts and sciences as the production of knowledge, understood as a collective human effort that cannot be accomplished in isolation.
Tetyana Antimirova – Provost's Innovative Teaching Award
Dr. Antimirova's approach to teaching science is based on the conviction that the best way to learn science is to practice it and the best way to learn concepts is to apply them to concrete problems and to visualize them through experiments, actively engaging the students in the process of understanding. With this aim, Tetyana has pioneered the creation of activity-based, student-centred, collaborative learning environments where students are encouraged to formulate their own questions and search for their own answers using a variety of novel tools. She has also made a significant impact on pedagogy at the secondary school level through her research into the impact of high school physics experience on students' attitudes towards the study of science work. Tetyana is the Chair of the Division of Physics Education of the Canadian Association of Physicists, has organized workshops and seminars, and given invited presentations at many national and international conferences. She is a member of the Committee on International Physics Teachers, and a member of the executive board of the Association of Physics Teachers.
Tetyana Antimirova – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I consider myself first and foremost a teacher. I see teaching as both a privilege and a colossal responsibility. Teaching is the profession that has enormous potential to influence many lives and to participate in shaping our future generations. I truly believe that my own teachers strongly influenced my choice of profession and thus, the entire course of my life. I view my role as an educator dedicated to help my students achieve their academic goals, become life-long learners and reach their maximum potential.
As far as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the natural world around me. My parents often recollected that weekend after weekend I asked them to take me to the local Natural History Museum. I was fortunate to have very knowledgeable and dedicated teachers who maintained and nourished my interest in sciences all the way through the years of middle and high school, and later through the university. Today, I try to share my fascination of physics with my own students. Teaching physics brings me the enormous personal satisfaction of giving back what I was so lucky to have received as a student many years ago.
Challenges in Science Teaching and the Role of Class Engagement
Generally, there is a wide gap between what we teach and what the students actually learn in our classes. Knowledge does not become truly functional until the student "appropriates" it. Although traditional lectures remain an important part of university teaching, a bulk of research on students' learning demonstrated that the students learn more effectively when they construct their own understanding through the combination of guided enquiry-based activities. One of my most important roles as an educator is to create an environment where the students are encouraged to formulate their own questions, solve problems, perform experiments and look for their own answers in a safe and inclusive environment. The steadily growing confidence in the students' ability to accumulate the knowledge is the best motivator in their future studies.
The university landscape has changed dramatically over the last three decades. Unlike in the past, when the majority of students taking physics classes were either physics or engineering majors taught in small traditional lecture classes, today's large physics classes also include students in the life sciences. In addition, today's physics classes for engineering programs have expanded dramatically. Therefore, the quality of physics teaching today affects a much wider population than ever before. Effective teaching-learning is unlikely to happen in a passive and disinterested class. Guided enquiry is the approach I strive to use in all aspects of my teaching. I always stress that studying physics offers unparalleled opportunities to develop such transferable skills as efficient problem-solving, critical thinking and logical reasoning. I believe that physics offers excellent tools to expose our students to the process of scientific thinking and to let them experience the process of scientific discovery. I aim to bring students closer to this goal by relaying to the students the relevance of everyday experiences.
I believe that class engagement can be greatly enhanced by the use of modern educational technologies, whenever appropriate. It is also crucial for my presentations to include live in-class demonstrations. When live experiments are not possible, I make use of video-analysis tools and computer simulations.
Every student learns differently and, unfortunately, physics is perceived by many as a difficult subject. In my classes, I encourage a small-group collaborative environment and I try to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and inclusiveness in which students with different learning styles and from different backgrounds feel comfortable.
The Impact of Science Education Research
My latest research interests grew from and are closely related to my teaching. My research findings are fully integrated into my teaching. A large part of my efforts have been directed at looking for new tools and methods of teaching physics, implementing them in the classroom and evaluating the outcomes. Over the years I incorporated into my own teaching interactive lecture demonstrations, peer training and collaborative small-group work. My current efforts focus on the use of advanced technologies such as clickers, video-based motion analysis, real-time data acquisition and analysis tools, on-line tutoring and homework systems, educational applets and computer simulations, and , most recently, the use of tablet PCs. All these tools are invaluable in supporting enquiry-based and activity-based learning. I develop, test and implement new teaching methods using these tools, and study their impact on students' learning outcomes, motivation and attitudes towards science.
The high school physics experience has a crucial impact on students' attitude towards science, as well as on the learning outcomes in introductory physics courses. Improving the students' success rate by facilitating the transition from high school to university is a pressing issue for a majority of Ontario Universities. This is why at Ryerson I initiated an outreach program to the community of high school physics teachers and volunteered to collaborate with representatives of the Toronto District School Board.
I believe in the need for on-going professional development. As educators we have a duty to share our findings with our colleagues. I am always ready to share my experience in using educational technologies and interactive pedagogies with my colleagues at Ryerson and beyond. This is why I became involved with professional organizations, whose mandate is to improve physics education and to advance the professional development of physics faculty at all levels. Currently, I serve as a Chair of the Division of Physics Education of the Canadian Association of Physicists; I am a Member of the Committee on International Physics Education of the American Association of Physics Teachers AAPT), an Ontario Section Representative to AAPT, and a member of the executive board of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers. Over the last several years I delivered numerous contributed and invited talks and taught several workshops at local, national and international conferences, and professional society meetings.
I believe that while we teach, we also learn from our students. I always seek informal feedback from my students, and I am always open to their suggestions. I view each new teaching assignment as a challenge and an opportunity to learn more about teaching itself and about my students. Last but not the least, students endowed with a life-long thrust of curiosity and learning will be competitive and successful in their endeavors of choice. In order to transform our students into life-long learners we, as educators, must lead by example by being proactive and always strive for our own self-improvement.
Mitu Singupta – Dean's Teaching Awards
Dr. Singupta is an exemplary teacher who has shown great innovation in the classroom and has served as a strong mentor to her students. Her ability to motivate students and enthusiasm for teaching is of the highest calibre. Her student evaluation scores have been consistently excellent across a range of courses. Students and faculty evaluators of Professor Sengupta's teaching have routinely commented on her engaging style, the attentiveness of the students, and her familiarity with the content. The overwhelming consensus is that Professor Singupta is a gifted instructor. For a newly tenured faculty member these are remarkable achievements. In the coming years, Mitu is sure to excel as both an exemplar of Ryerson's commitment to first-rate teaching and as a role model and mentor for students.
Robert Teigrob – Dean's Teaching Award
Dr. Teigrob (PhD, University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Assistant Professor of History, having joined the Department in 2007. In his short tenure at Ryerson he has already established a reputation as one of the best professors in the university: widely praised not just for his strong teaching skills, but also for his inspiration, dedication to learning, and powerful engagement of students. Routinely described as "excellent", "awesome", and "outstanding" in student evaluations, Rob has also demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to curriculum development and innovative teaching strategies. Above all, through his dedication, humour, and passion for teaching, Rob has extended learning well-beyond the lecture hall: developing a connection with students that one referee described as "empowering us all."
Robert Teigrob – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I conceive of my role as a facilitator of learning, one who, while possessing a greater degree of specific subject knowledge than my students, is continually arriving at new perspectives and insights as a result of an interactive classroom dynamic. I encourage discussion, debate, and questions even in high-enrollment classes, and strive to create an environment free of intimidation that respects all sincere contributions. Above all, I aim to move students away from the notion that they are consumers of a product, instead emphasizing student participation in, and responsibility for, the success of their course experience. I stress that this success requires good attendance, participation, meeting deadlines, and above all, intellectual rigour. I am not afraid to place high demands on my students, and while these demands sometimes elicit resistance, they have also been a consistent source of expressions of student gratitude at the conclusion of their course experience.
I also consider myself an advocate for the relevance and appeal of in-depth and critical interrogations of historical problems, not an easy task in an environment in which such endeavors are too often regarded as inherently dull and/or lacking specific career application. To accomplish this goal, I require that students make connections between past and present, whether in lectures, debates, presentations, or written assignments. I also strive to bring a great deal of energy and enthusiasm to the recounting of the historical narrative, to reveal historical personages not as mythological figures but complex and contradictory humans with failings as well as strengths, and where appropriate, to utilize humour as a means of maintaining interest. I believe such an orientation goes far in instilling in students the confidence to critically assess and contradict received accounts of the past. This effort to remain engaged with the latest debates within the discipline also requires that I update regularly the reading lists and lecture content, and make a concerted effort to introduce aspects of my own research and scholarship into the classroom.
Throughout my career as a teacher, I have had the good fortune of instructing students from a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic contexts, many of whom were first-generation university attendees. I consider myself privileged to be associated with the profession during a period which has witnessed a democratization of higher learning, and place special emphasis on ensuring that students who did not have access to the financial and pedagogical resources I enjoyed are provided an opportunity to succeed. Often this has meant building strong relationships with appropriate student resource centers (whether they provide academic, financial, or counseling services); at other times, student success requires an enhancement of self-confidence and a sense of belonging in what might be a new and impersonal environment. For this reason, I maintain an open door office policy, post all relevant course materials on continually-updated Blackboard websites, and respond in a timely and thorough manner to all e-mail inquiries. I also provide opportunities in class for students to announce meetings, events, and performances that they may be involved with, whether within or outside the university setting, and take time to attend some of these events myself. My aim is to strengthen connections among students, and between students and the wider community.
Each of my classes includes a seminar component, one which requires that students read and debate issues raised by primary and secondary historical documents. I find these sessions particularly important as class sizes grow, as the seminars allow me to get to know students in groups of roughly 20, and, given the diverse makeup of Ryerson's student body, to hear various perspectives on international issues from a global perspective. The subject of international relations and the multicultural composition of the Ryerson community are in this way something of a perfect fit, and make for a truly exciting and pedagogically-rewarding opportunity. Seminars are also vital in providing an opportunity for students who may possess stronger oral than written communication skills, as seminar participation constitutes a significant proportion of the final grade (15-20%). However, I am also aware that such sessions are new and sometimes intimidating for people without prior experience in the discipline, or who are by nature not as outgoing as some of their classmates. I always encourage these students to talk to me about any issues they may have surrounding seminar participation, and to strategize about improving this aspect of their course experience. In the past, such strategizing has involved one-on-one sessions with particularly shy students in advance of the group session, so that they can enjoy an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned in what they consider to be a safer environment. In more than one instance, the confidence these one-on-one sessions has inspired has led previously silent students to begin to interact in the wider seminar session, a circumstance that brought considerable joy to student and professor alike.
Being a member of a non-degree, service department that draws students from a variety of disciplines provides special challenges, as students come to class with a disparate set of skills and knowledge (much of it bearing only a vague relationship to the discipline of history). This fact has led me to develop assignments that seek to draw on the specific knowledge base of particular, non-historical disciplines (with suggested topics created around the specific degree programmes identified by my RAMSS class list). This serves to give students greater confidence that they can say something of relevance in their essays, demonstrates the importance of historical thinking to all aspects of the human experience, and more often than not furnishes me with new and relevant information about the relationship of history to other disciplines. I have provided a sample assignment along these lines as part of this application package.
Finally, over the past two years I have liaised with Ryerson's Service Learning office to create community-based service opportunities for students enrolled in ACS 402, Introduction to Global Studies. I consider this experience one of the most rewarding of my professional career, as it demonstrates to participants the connections between international relations theory and practice, and provides students with an opportunity to confront some of the many challenges that are raised in class (global poverty, disease, war, etc.). Thus far we have partnered with child-focused development agency Plan Canada, as well as World University Service of Canada, an agency that brings university-aged residents of refugee camps to Canada so that they can complete their degrees. The community partners have reported high levels of satisfaction regarding the students' contribution, and the students have responded with unbridled enthusiasm to these projects, in some cases continuing their partnership with these agencies beyond the school term. I now consider Service Learning to be a permanent and vital component of ACS 402, and am considering ways to introduce SL into the other courses that I teach as well. To me, the program is the perfect embodiment of the Ryerson mission, and I and the student participants are grateful that the university has made room for such an opportunity to connect learning with practical and positive action.
Ann Rauhala – Dean's Teaching Award
Professor Rauhala was once asked to choose a personal metaphor for teaching. She picked lead spelunker, a cave explorer guiding students through the unknown. "I shine the flashlight on the secrets of an undiscovered world," she says. Her mission is to show students they have the ability to succeed. Her students say she encourages learning through laughter. She challenges them to be bold. She motivates them to push the limits. One wrote: "Ann inspired the entire class to believe they had talent, just like Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets Society - except without the hairy arms." While Ann puts students at ease, she's no pushover. They know they have to work hard. "I remember finally getting that elusive 'A'," another wrote, "and knowing it meant something." Ann, a graduate herself of the School of Journalism, has found the magic to help students find confidence, pride and purpose.
Ann Rauhala – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Bloom
In a teacher training session I once attended, the instructor asked us to name a personal metaphor for teaching. Were we sculptors, carving and polishing young minds, or maybe gardeners, nurturing growth and weeding out poor results? This was easy. Within 10 seconds, I knew: I was the head spelunker, a cave explorer who guides students through the unknown and unseen. Sometimes leading, sometimes stumbling behind, I shine the flashlight on the secrets of an undiscovered world. I may not have every answer, but I know how and where to look. My mission is to show students that their ability to succeed has been there all along, if only they just find it.
Although that analogy was more apt when I started as a CUPE instructor, the metaphor still captures my central philosophy as a teacher. For me, teaching helps students discover and develop what they already possess - skills and abilities that will make them careful researchers, challenging analysts, informed citizens, critical thinkers and inspired journalists. I believe that this attitude explains the strong rapport that I enjoy with students. Although I remain final arbiter, they know that I respect their ideas and have confidence in their ability to become better thinkers, editors and writers. The School of Journalism's -and FCAD's - commitment to studio education has reinforced my belief that learning is discovery and has assisted my transition from journalist to professor. In my first year of teaching, I acted as a coach in the hands-on practice of reporting news, a 'sort-of' supervisor who guided students through challenges that I myself had faced working in newsrooms. I was lucky: my first class was easygoing, talkative and cohesive. A bit too dazzled by my professional background, they were forgiving of my inexperience as a teacher and ranked me as enthusiastic (1.1), responsive (1.1), respectful (1.2) and effective (1.3).
The next year, I realized how much I had to learn. My reporting class was a dispirited group. My teaching load had tripled and included copy editing, a subject that requires logistical finesse from the teacher and a huge range of disparate skills for students to master. (Copy editors do everything from rewriting lengthy articles to writing headlines to designing pages.) My stand-up comedy routine was not going to suffice.
I took advantage of every session I could attend offered by LTO and took to heart every suggestion made in my teaching assessments. However, the turning point occurred when I read 7 Kinds of Smart, a layperson's synopsis of Howard Gardner's theories on learning. It was a revelation, a shimmering treasure in the caves.
Gardner organizes modes of thinking and learning into categories that isolate and define their components. Auditory learners acquire knowledge primarily by listening and talking, for example, more so than, say, visual learners, who prefer to see information. Gardner does not prescribe rigid rules but instead establishes a paradigm for thinking about and experimenting with pedagogy. Most people possess a range of learning styles and preferences and, so, most classes benefit from a combination of auditory, visual, kinesthetic and other approaches. To me, Gardner's brilliance is his respect for every type of learning and his enthusiasm for harnessing them.
I applied these lessons immediately and, I think, effectively, from the minutiae of course management to the explanation of overarching concepts. I realized, for example, that no matter how often I might give an instruction orally, visual learners simply had to have it written down. I began to write more on the board, prepared more handouts, drew pictures to explain abstractions, played music, had them act out roles. Morale among the discouraged writers rose as their confusion evaporated.
In copy editing, I used techniques adapted from 7 Kinds to build confidence among students intimidated by the visual and math skills needed for layout and design. In one playful, 5-minute exercise, for example, I ask students to draw a map of the world from memory. The results are instructive and democratic in their variety, from perfect but wordless maps tracing every shoreline to schematic blobs with highly-detailed labels. What an effective (and visual) demonstration of how each brain works differently and yet also how each mind offers its own style and substance.
My exploration continued when I did specialized training in university teaching through the Poynter Fellowship at Indiana University. There were hundreds of ideas on offer about course management, presentation, instruction and assessment. Importantly for me, there was also an overview of pedagogical theory that has informed my thinking since. Yet, amid all the information available, the most important idea I gained was that I should expect more from students. Or, to put this in terms of Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of abstraction, although students may know, understand and apply knowledge, we must also inspire them to analyze, synthesize and evaluate as well.
In FCAD, technique always matters but students must go beyond process, to recognize patterns in media and in public debate, to synthesize information and create new work from old formats, to evaluate ideas and theories about journalism. With journalism's very existence at risk in 2010, this is more important than ever. In Bloom, I found a means by which I could inspire students to move up the ladder of abstraction. How rewarding those higher expectations became when I taught a group two courses, for a total of 10 hours together every week. We sped through the essentials and moved to independent inquiry that students loved -although it was many more hours of homework.
My teaching has also been shaped by my time as a part-time student at University of Toronto. (I was required as a condition of tenure to obtain an MA, which I did in June, 2004.) Again, the insights ranged from the micro to the macro. I learned how often a class needs a coffee break and how clever it is to put course outlines on coloured paper. (Students can find them.) But I also realized how thrilling it was to be in a class where I was expected to soar, where ideas and ideas about ideas were spread out on the horizon. I wanted that for my students, too, and have tried to incorporate the approaches I learned at grad school to achieve moments of awe and possibility. Is it time to talk about structuring an argument in a newspaper editorial? Let's look at Aristotle's rules of rhetoric. Shall we discuss opening sentences? Let's look at Tolstoy or Austen or Vonnegut.
Teaching for me is a journey, trite as that may sound. Every year I learn something new. Every year there are new paths to explore and new information to discover. I believe I have transmitted that habit of inquiry and exploration among my students.
I believe that my approach is in complete alignment with the goals of FCAD and the university. I hope you will agree.
Soosan Beheshti – Dean's Teaching Award
Dr. Beheshti was born in Esfahan, Iran and received the B.S. degree from Isfahan Institute of Technology and M.S. and PhD degrees from Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in 1996 and 2002, respectively, all in electrical engineering. During her graduate studies, she was a member of Digital Signal Processing Group and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and received the MIT EECS Carlton E. Tucker Award for Teaching Excellence. She has been with the ELCE Department of Ryerson University as an Assistant Professor since July 2005 and is the coordinator of the Signal and Information Processing (SIP) Laboratory. She is an accomplished and confident teacher, very approachable, good humoured, committed to students' learning and universally well-liked. Despite being relatively new in the department she goes out of her way to be a mentor and help other new colleagues fit in.
Peter Strahlendorf – Dean's Teaching Award
In his 18 years as a full-time member of the School of Occupational and Public Health, Dr. Strahlendorf has gained an enviable reputation as someone who consistently motivates and inspires his students through his mastery of a distinctive pedagogical approach involving case studies and question-and-answer methods; his integration of best practices within OHS Law; and the use of a distinctive brand of humour which has become the stuff of student legend and lore within our School. By showing how the theoretical applies to the practical, how the past can be mined to help understand the future in central career contexts, and how the personal always ends up influencing the professional, Dr. Strahlendorf provides a stirring example of what a model professor of Occupational Health and Safety should be. His distinctive melding of these various qualities makes him the perfect recipient for the FCS Dean's Teaching Award.
Peter Strahlendorf – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
An instructor's teaching philosophy should be unique; a reflection of the instructor's own academic history, work experience, areas of research, nature of courses taught, types of students in the class and the format (seminar, lecture, distance, intensive) of the courses taught. While universities standardize and proceduralize many things these days, diversity in teaching styles enriches the student's experience, and is an important element in academic freedom.
My academic background is in biology and law - science and humanities. These are very different academic traditions and "cultures". I don't view myself as a biologist dabbling in law, or a lawyer dabbling in biology, but as a participant in both traditions. Since I have only one brain, there has been a considerable amount of cross-fertilization, resulting in some insight and a lot of scepticism. I don't teach science quite the way scientists do, and I don't teach law the way it's taught in law schools.
In keeping with Ryerson University's polytechnic tradition, I have a broad experience in industry and in the professions. In the polytechnic tradition, good teaching comes from continued interaction with industry and the professions. The understanding is that new knowledge, issues and innovations often arise from practice. Teaching students who are destined for industry and the professions requires a flow of knowledge from the outside world into the classroom. The purely academic perspective, not of the polytechnic tradition, views good teaching to be the result of good research, and that the university is the source of new knowledge. New knowledge flows from the laboratory to the class and then to industry and the professions. The optimal situation in the classroom is neither extreme, but a healthy integration of new knowledge from both sources.
As Ryerson evolves from a polytechnic to something closer to a generic university, what is sometimes over-looked is the expectations of students. When students come to the classroom most of them are not expecting to become academics; they are expecting to be equipped for careers in industry and the professions. In the polytechnic tradition, that was fully understood. In the generic university, there is risk of students' expectations being viewed with less concern by the pure academic. Some faculty who primarily enjoy research have said that teaching is the price one must pay in order to have the privilege of doing research. I don't agree with that view, as it implicitly downgrades our primary mission at SOPH. SOPH is one of the schools at Ryerson that was created for the purpose of educating professionals; in our case for two identifiable, definable and predictable careers - public health inspectors and occupational health and safety managers. A large portion of our undergraduate student body already have university degrees - in subjects that are not so related to particular careers. Hence, our students' expectations are very high, much higher than in a generic university, that teaching in the classroom will be relevant to their expected careers. The content of our curriculum is closely related to the expectations of external professional certifying bodies. Given our origins, our purpose, the expectations of our students and of our professional communities, teaching is of the highest importance in SOPH
Teaching that is open to a continual influence by our professional communities is critical. We discussed violence in the workplace as an OHS issue (and not merely a criminal issue) 15 years before Ontario's legislation changed to include it. The reverse flow is also important. Many OHS practitioners, under the influence of US-based consulting firms marketing their products, believe "behavioural psychology" is cutting edge science, and have never heard of the more modern "cognitive psychology". At Ryerson, I believe we should never simply teach what our professional communities want us to teach their future members. Often professional practice is wrong or out-dated. I view the classroom as a crucible into which new issues and insights flow from both work experience and research. I don't think the classroom should be merely the nexus of two passive flows of information, but that classroom debate and discussion can give rise to new ideas out of the original material from the two sources. I do not think it is as simple as "theory" from academia and "practice" from the professions; I can think of many instances over the years where that the common perception has been inverted. Overall, I would say that Ryerson, with its polytechnic origin, has been a place where the "crucible model" of the classroom has done well, and I have enjoyed participating in it.
At many conventional universities there has been a concerted effort to become more "interdisciplinary" - to break down the walls between traditional disciplines. One of the things that attracted me to Ryerson over 20 years ago was an atmosphere of informality about disciplinary boundaries. That may be changing now, and the irony of having other universities become more like Ryerson, as Ryerson strives to move towards the generic university, is increasingly clear. It is partly a reflection of our applied, professional perspective that Ryerson has always been strongly interdisciplinary in its educational culture. I find it very satisfying to discuss psychology, moral philosophy, law and toxicology all in the same lecture. I have always felt at home, with my mixed background, teaching at Ryerson.
One characteristic of my teaching style is the influence of both academic traditions in my own background - a visual style from the sciences and a verbal Socratic style from law. I almost always teach with visual material on the screen with a verbal parallel presentation. I teach law in a way that is very dissimilar to how law is taught in law schools - far more visual. I teach science in a more Socratic style than is customary. I think a weakness in science teaching is the passivity of the class relative to a humanities class in which the Socratic method is used. The Socratic method assumes that students can find the answers to questions from their own experience and reason. It is very often an unsuitable method in science. Where the course content is science-based, but is also very practical or applied, as most of the SOPH courses are, then the Socratic method is useful with regards to implications, examples, decision-making under uncertainty, etc. The Socratic method requires that the teacher be flexible enough to repeatedly and extensively depart from lecture notes to pursue lines of enquiry with individual students in the class. In fact, I don't use lecture notes in the traditional manner. I am guided by the visual material on the screen but speak without notes ... and, particularly when attention seems to be waning, try to draw examples, implications, alternate meanings, applications and contrary views from the students.
Teaching a course in Continuing Education has a very positive effect on teaching the same course in the full-time program. I have had the benefit of teaching many of the SOPH courses to CE students, who are generally much older, and usually very much more experienced. Such mature students are not shy about offering their experiences with the issues in the course material. A student who is working in OHS as an OHS coordinator for a company can describe his or her handling of a work refusal case, or the interaction with a regulatory inspector, where such stories are unlikely to come from the younger SOPH students. Their applications, stories, criticisms, and subtleties greatly improve the insight with which I can use the materials with the SOPH students. CE students come from a wide variety of work sectors - much of the content of OHS knowledge has to be adapted moving from one sector to another. Those multiple perspectives from a CE course can be brought into the SOPH class. As well, CE has a wider range of formats for course delivery. I developed the print based distance education (DE) versions of three SOPH courses (prior to the shift to web-based DE courses). The discipline of converting class room lectures into written and visual material that can be used by a student working alone feeds back to improve the materials used in the SOPH classroom. There is an improving discipline to delivering a 14 week course into a 42 hour one week intensive course - where nothing can go wrong with the logistics, materials, tempo - and where you are forced to keep students engaged for far longer periods of time than in any ordinary class.
I should add something in particular about teaching law courses to SOPH students - who will not be practicing law as lawyers. When you ask "why are we studying law?" in a law school, the answer is "we might have to give someone advice about this some day". When we ask that question to SOPH students, the answer for the PH students is "we will be enforcing this law" and for the OHS students "we will be complying with this law". It helps engage students when the perspective is: "when you are an inspector .... " , "when you are in court prosecuting for breach of this section..." and "when you are advising senior management about the implications of this change in the law ...", "when you receive an Order from the inspector to comply with this section ... ". Law school students know that they will not be practising in entire areas of law, and much of the content of the law school courses is not what they will have a personal involvement with. SOPH students, on the other hand, have a much more intimate and personal relationship with very specific areas of law ("this is your Act"). It is an important part of my teaching philosophy that we keep coming back to why studying the material will matter very much to the student in a personal way into the future.
There are those who believe that law is relatively simple - anyone who can read, can read statutes and cases, and understand the law. Not much need to teach. No complex math or equipment needed. But law is one of the oldest disciplines and is a mature subject in its own right; it is not mere language. If teaching law is merely a matter of reading, then teaching law must inevitably consist of reading sections of an Act off the screen - what some people call "black letter law" ("this is what the law is"). Law is not a science and it is based largely on textual analysis. Law is highly dependant on understanding legal concepts, on being able to find very specific legal sources, on using the concepts in textual analysis, applying the law to a particular factual problem. Whether students are aware of it or not at the time, when working through large volumes of primary source legal materials, they develop the ability to understand legal textual material by applying definitions, by applying the purpose of the text to an analysis of the meaning of a part of the text, by linking parts of the text to each other, by applying the policy or background philosophy of the text (e.g. the IRS) to the meaning of the parts. You don't learn to ride a bicycle by simply reading the instruction manual. You don't learn to think like a lawyer or a judge by reading about the law, but only by participating within legal analysis. I mention this because I think some students find the volume of work in the SOPH law courses to be excessive - but it's a particular method of learning that suits the subject.
Historically, non-lawyers were at the mercy of the "legal priesthood" in obtaining and understanding the law. Up until 15 years ago if you wanted to know what the law was on a subject, you had to ask a lawyer. Either that, or you had to physically travel to a law library (which are immense) and figure out how to use it. The internet has democratized access to law. Within minutes our graduates are able to obtain the text of any Act, regulation, case or Board decision relevant to their problem. Even so, when searching, you have to ask the right questions, and use the right terminology. When looking at a source on the Web, our graduates will be able to apply their knowledge of legal concepts and their textual analysis skills to make sense of what they're looking at. Without an understanding of the structure and function of the legal system it is hard to tell the relevance or reliability of a source of law. Our graduates will be much more capable of using the public's new access to legal materials than un-trained members of the public. Putting it another way, an unstated, implicit agenda in the way I teach law is that our graduates will be able to pick up any regulatory legal materials for any Canadian jurisdiction they end up in, and quickly be able to make sense of the legal text and apply it. They learn not only what the law is, but they learn generic, legal analytical skills that are transferable to areas of law they have not yet encountered.
A characteristic of my teaching style is the use of real life anecdotes and stories. In part, this style comes from the reliance in law schools on the case law method; cases being, in essence, stories. I also believe, as a matter of evolutionary psychology, that people by their nature, learn largely from face-to-face story-telling. I try to draw on a large collection of cases, news-clippings and industry anecdotal experiences to illustrate problems, conflicts, alternate resolutions, and so on.
I am told by many students that they appreciate my dry sense of humour. They say that the use of humour in the class makes an otherwise dry and boring topic very interesting. My only objection to that observation would be that I don't find any of the subjects I teach to be dry or boring.
David Miller – Dean's Teaching Award
Dr. Miller completed both his Ph.D. in Comparative Religion at Harvard University and his Bachelor of Divinity at Harvard University and has held teaching positions at numerous universities including the University of Toronto, Concordia and Case Western Reserve to name a few.
With over 45 years of teaching experience and a wide range of publications to his credit, David has taught "The Philosophy of Religion" at The Chang School for over 10 years.
Dave Valliere – Dean's Teaching Award
Dr. Valliere joined the faculty of Ryerson in 2004, teaching four different undergraduate courses and two graduate courses in the Entrepreneurship and Strategy Department. Like many Ryerson faculty members, he brings the insight and connections of many years of successful real-world business experience into the classroom to augment the purely academic and theoretical aspects of our program. Dr. Valliere is deeply committed to excellence in teaching and to the success of his students, both within the context of their university studies, and in their ongoing careers as management professionals. He provides a rare combination of very high academic standards and expectations (which inspires the best from our strongest students) and an ability to make complex subjects seem simple and accessible (which encourages and captivates all of our students). His style is passionate and energetic, connecting with students and helping them to discover the joy and excitement of an entrepreneurial career.
Dave Valliere – Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I believe that teaching is an equal partnership between instructor and learner and a process of joint discovery, one which works best when both parties make firm commitments for their own roles and have clear expectations of each other. I typically begin new courses by making explicit this social contract between me and my students using some variant of the following to provoke discussion:
I will
- Provide the opportunity to learn
- Respect your investment of time and money
- Deliver value added content in every class
- Contribute to your own learning outcome
- Respect my investment of time and effort
- Prepare adequately for every class
I generally aim the level of my classes at the students who are slightly higher than average performance, to provide an attainable challenge for most. I provide additional supports, tutorials and extra materials to help the weaker students keep up with the class as a whole. I also take occasional bursts to dizzying heights to provide challenges for the top students and inspire the average students to give them some glimpse of how far the subject matter goes, and some intuitive sense of the joy of learning and exploring at the very frontiers of knowledge. Such outbursts are immediately followed by translations into plain terms and simple analogies to help the other students to see where we've been and to be encouraged, rather than discouraged by the distance covered. By making such translations into everyday terms, I help all students realize that there is nothing arcane or insurmountable about academic heights. Anyone can visit there if motivated to do the climbing.
I like to draw widely for the materials used in class, to connect with both popular culture and great academics of the past. My business courses frequently address important social issues of the day, quote relevant poetry, and discuss relevant Eastern and Western philosophical ideas ("There was nothing special about Socrates except his willingness to challenge what he actually knew and to face his own ignorance"). I also commonly draw inspiration from great scientists (e.g., Newton or Feymann) to encourage entrepreneurship students to try to examine the world more critically and more incisively than most people. Through this approach, I try to inspire these students to have the intellectual courage to act independently and decisively, and the skills and intellectual rigour to do so successfully. As I frequently tell students: "If you say you want to be an entrepreneur, most people will tell you you're crazy! And they just might be right. How would you know?"
But to challenge and stretch students to these heights, it is also essential to establish a safe and supportive environment, one where students know they have been equipped with all the necessary knowledge, skills, tools and attitudes, and where they know it is okay to experiment, to try yet fail, and to regroup and begin again. And so it is my challenge to strike a delicate balance between entreating them to reach higher than they think possible, and showing them how far they have already climbed! For example, in early classes I will strive to demystify the exclusionary jargon of specialist fields (such as venture capital financing) to help students develop confidence and a common sense approach to the underlying concepts. But in later classes I will slowly reintroduce the jargon by highlighting the important but subtle distinctions that are missed by common plain languages treatments of the subject. Students come away from the experience with an advanced understanding of the material, achieved without ever feeling swamped or lost.
In this manner I try to get all my students to approach the very edge of current knowledge of the entrepreneurship field, warts and all. I want them all to have the confidence to develop views and positions uniquely their own, with a confidence that is firmly grounded in informed opinions and in having done the wide ranging and careful thinking necessary to be sure they aren't "crazy" for wanting to pursue an entrepreneurial path.
Ken Grant – Dean's Teaching Award
Professor Grant, BA; MBA; GDipMC; DBA (ABD); is Director of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management. He teaches in the areas of Business and IT Strategy, Process and Performance Improvement and Electronic Commerce. After over thirty years of a successful management consulting career as Vice-President and Principal/Partner at A.T. Kearney/ EDS and KPMG, Professor Grant was the founding Director of Canada's premier "Information Technology Management" in Business program. During his eleven years of teaching at Ryerson, he has demonstrated outstanding contribution to the development of the School of ITM and the new MBA program in Technology and Innovation. Professor Grant is also a highly sought-after lecturer and mentor given his exceptional track record in teaching that has earned him superior appraisals from fellow colleagues, senior administrators, current students and alumni. All in all, the entire nomination team wholeheartedly believe that Professor Grant is the true essence of a role model, mentor, teacher, and most importantly, a lifelong friend to alumni and faculty members. To bestow this year's Dean's Teaching Award to Professor Grant is our appreciation and recognition of his teaching accomplishments.