Gary Poole

This year for the first time the award is made to two people: Cynthia Weston from McGill and Gary Poole from UBC. Cynthia cannot be with us but she wrote to say how “thrilled and honored” she feels to have received the award and apologies that she cannot be here with Gary to join us tonight. She will be presented with her award at the 2011 STLHE conference.

Gary Poole is one of the most well known and respected figures in Canadian educational development. In 1992 he became the first director of SFU’s Centre for University Teaching and was at SFU for 12 years before moving down the mountain to UBC. He recently retired as Director of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth and the Founding Director of the Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the University of British Columbia.

He served for 10 years on the Steering Committee of STLHE, and for four years as our fourth president, during which time it is fair he changed the face of the organization and put it on a much more professional footing, with a permanent secretariat, expanded external partnerships, institutional memberships, and engagement in a comprehensive strategic planning exercise.

His organization of the wonderful annual meetings of educational developers each February in Vancouver led to the establishment of the Educational Developers Caucus which is now such an important part of STLHE. He was also very active in the establishment of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, of which is about to become President.

Gary is an educational leader, writer, award winning teacher (he earned a 3M Teaching Fellowship in 1994), educational broadcaster, sportsman, and fashion model (hence the extraordinary sight of me in a suit).

On a personal note, he was responsible for a gesture that gave me perhaps my greatest pleasure on the occasion of my retirement from Queen’s in 2002 – which was the creation of this very award in my name. I am absolutely delighted to recognize Gary Poole as the fifth recipient of the Christopher Knapper Lifetime achievement Award.

Dale Roy

In the great tradition of naming buildings and awards after serious donors, we must thank Magna for their generosity in providing financial support.

This award was established in 2002 to “honour individuals who have, over their career, made significant contributions to teaching, learning and educational development in Canadian higher education.” This is the fourth award and it is made to someone known to almost all of us, one of Society’s founders, and a close personal colleague and friend, Dale Roy.

I have known Dale since the early 1980s, and we were both present at the meeting that established the Society. Dale served as STLHE’s first treasurer for 11 years, served on the Steering Committee for 17 years, and is perhaps best known for his setting up and running the successful 3M Teaching Fellowships program, from 1986 to 2001.

He is the longest continuously serving director of an educational development centre, and has had a major influence on teaching at McMaster, especially though its extensive work with inquiry-based learning.

In summary, Dale has done a great deal to enhance teaching and learning at McMaster, in Ontario, and across Canada. He is one of STLHE’s outstanding figures, and a much-loved colleague of many hundreds of teachers across the country.

It gives me great personal pleasure to present the 2008 Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award to Dale Roy.

Bente Roed

Third Recipient of the Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award

Citation
Presented by Christopher Knapper at the STLHE Conference
June 15, 2006, Toronto, ON

The Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award was created in 2002 to honour someone who has made an outstanding contribution, over their career, to teaching, learning, and educational development in Canadian higher education.  For most of you it will be a wonderful surprise to hear that this year the award is being presented to Bente Roed of the University of Alberta.

I have known Bente for over 20 years during her long term as Director of Alberta's University Teaching Services (UTS).  We have worked together on many different initiatives, including an ambitious plan to reform teaching and learning at Alberta in 1988 (the Inventory and Plan for Teaching Effectiveness), and more recently the very successful annual orientation for new faculty.

Many of you will know UTS for its unrivalled and extensive workshop program and its widely circulated, most beautifully illustrated educational development newsletter, reflecting Bente's extensive contacts in the Alberta artistic community.  UTS was one of the earliest and best-known educational development centres in Canada, and the first to host an STLHE conference outside Ontario, in 1989.  Bente served on the Steering Committee of STLHE for many years, and has served on almost all its other committees.

Apart from her work a s an educational developer, Bente has many other talents, for example she is a professional gallery curator, published writer on art (especially print-making), gardener, cook and -- despite her slight figure -- general gourmand who knows the best restaurants in every STLHE conference venue.  In 2002 she was honoured by the Academic Women's Association of Alberta as their "Woman of the Year", and there is a graduate scholarship in her name.

Despite all these accomplishments, perhaps Bente's greatest attribute is not to push herself forward, but rather to marshal the efforts and resources of others, indeed, to let others shine, something she does with a mixture of modesty and tenacity.

Her nominators describe her as a welcoming presence, mentor, role model, and general inspiration and support -- they say especially for women, but I can attest also for the men who are lucky enough to come within her orbit.

For all these reasons it gives me great pleasure to present the third Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award to Bente Roed.  Bente will make a special presentation at next year’s annual conference.

Harry Murray

Second Recipient of the Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award

Citation
Presented by Christopher Knapper at the STLHE Conference
June 17, 2004, Ottawa ON

It is a great personal pleasure for me that the second Christopher Knapper award should go to one of my oldest colleagues, Professor Harry Murray of the University of Western Ontario. I am not entirely sure when Harry and I first met, but it may have been at an early conference on university teaching that took place in Winnipeg in the mid-1970s. At that time both Harry and I were young psychology professors (hard to credit, I know!), I at the University of Saskatchewan , and Harry at the University of Western Ontario.

All those years ago we both had a major interest in the improvement and evaluation of university teaching. In 1976 I moved to Ontario to become a full-time educational developer at the University of Waterloo, while Harry became one of Canada 's leading researchers into university teaching and learning. Among his huge research output, some of Harry's seminal studies have focussed on the evaluation of teaching and the characteristics of effective teachers. He demonstrated that ongoing evaluation of teaching can indeed improve a teacher's effectiveness. And he was one of the first researchers to send student observers into university classrooms to find out what effective teachers do that distinguishes them from their less effective colleagues.

Harry has published in the very best psychological and education journals, but he has always been interested in tackling issues that have real-life applications for teaching practice. He has made considerable efforts to communicate the results of his research to colleagues, using a wide range of means, including his many highly readable newsletter articles, his frequent workshops and talks at meetings and conferences (including an early STLHE keynote address), and his famous OCUFA guide to teaching evaluation, which is the best short summary of research on the evaluation of university teaching that I know. (The guide has unfortunately been out of print for some time, and several members of the STLHE Publications Committee have been urging Harry to revise it as a Green Guide!). His advice has been sought time and time again by universities across the country and beyond (for example, he has devised teaching evaluation systems not only for Western, but for the University of Queensland ).

Harry was one of the small group that helped found STLHE in 1983, and my notes tell me that his wife Shirley was also present at that initial meeting, along with colleagues from Waterloo, Guelph, Western, McMaster, and York. He was extremely active in the society, especially in our early days. Although he does not call himself an educational developer, Harry was also very influential in the establishment of the Teaching Support Centre at Western, served on its advisory committee for many years, and largely because of his personal prestige and his influence with the broader academic community at UWO, was on several occasions influential in shielding the centre from the depredations of unsympathetic senior administrators. It is also worth noting that Harry's wife Shirley served as the first secretary of the Western centre, and was also involved in the early affairs of STLHE, including the organization of our annual conference in London in 1984.

It was while at Western that Harry developed what I believe to be the first credit course on teaching and learning in higher education for senior graduate students, which he taught for several years, and which has been the model for many similar courses at other Canadian universities. Harry also had an invitation from a graduate of this course to offer it in Singapore . This is a typical example of Harry's generosity in sharing his curriculum and resources with colleagues elsewhere who wanted to build on his pioneering work.

Last but not least, Harry is himself an exemplary teacher, who has won awards at his own institution, as well as provincial and national awards, including a 3M teaching fellowship in 1992. It was Harry and a group of 3M fellows who developed the well-known Ethical Principles in University Teaching, which have been printed in the tens of thousands and distributed all over the world.

Although he is now technically retired, Harry continues to work on teaching and learning issues, and one of his current projects involves the monitoring of an innovative engineering curriculum at Western. Apart from being a close professional colleague, Harry has been a friend for many years, and he is a wonderful fellow to spend time with. He has many unlikely interests. Nearly everyone knows about his devotion to golf, which guides his choice of vacations, consulting projects, and sabbatical leaves. But he has other passions that come and go, including rock music and fast sports cars. I think the time I saw Harry most elated was when I met at an STLHE conference to which he had driven fast from a game of golf in his Mazda Miata, playing all his Beatles tapes at full volume.

You will appreciate it would be hard to find anyone better fitted to receive the second Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award. Harry is a teacher, scholar, and educator who has made major contributions to our understanding of teaching, learning, and educational development, and someone who played a pivotal role in the establishment of STLHE. I am personally delighted to be here to present him with the award.

Evaluating University Teaching: A Review of Research
(Toronto: Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, 1980)

See Harry Murray's paper entitled,"Student Evaluation of Teaching: Has it Made a Difference?" presented as part of the Award at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, June 2005.

Christopher Knapper

Lifetime Achievement Award

Presented by Gary Poole
June 2002, Hamilton ON