From the outset of his academic career, David Bentley has distinguished himself as a dedicated and extraordinarily effective teacher in every kind of classroom situation. Whether in large introductory courses, smaller lecture-discussion groups, seminars, or graduate tutorials, he has distin guished himself in the eyes of students and colleagues alike as an industrious, imaginative, and provocative teacher. Over his 15- year career at the University of Western Ontario, David Bentley has compiled a teaching record second-to-none. He combines masterful teaching with original scholarship of the highest calibre. In 1993, he was awarded the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching.

David Bentley supervises the weekly teaching workshops for some 10 teaching assistants in the Department of English. He continues to lead a group of advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the task of building a computer-based resource for teaching Canadian literature and culture. In making these resources available to students and teachers of Canadian culture, he has had a significant impact on curriculum. In 1993, he was chosen to share with Dr. Polanyi the task of addressing the Ontario Council of Universities on the question of the connection between teaching and research in post-secondary education.

Norman Cameron is an innovative teacher who consistently ranks among the top teachers in the department, based on student evaluations. His teaching is also held in very high esteem by his colleagues. He possesses the quintessential qualities of an outstanding teacher: an excellent understanding of his subject, enthusiasm for important recent developments and debates, outstanding communication skills, and a deep concern for the education of his students. His contributions to teaching have been recognized by a University Teaching Award (the Saunderson Award) and a University Outreach Award during the 1980s.

Norman Cameron’s teaching skills are drawn upon extensively by his department, by other units on campus, by other educational institutions in Canada and by local media and community groups. In the early 1970s, he was chair of the Economics department’s first teaching committee. Twenty some years later, he continues to be active and effective in the programs of University Teaching Services both as a course and program leader and as one of the key members of the Peer Consultant program. He has written and edited an assortment of articles in support of teaching and has been active in curriculum design work well beyond his own courses.

In 1991, Thomas Cleary was awarded the University of Victoria Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was one of the first winners of this annual award which acknowledged publicly something that has been clear since his arrival at the University in 1969, that he is a truly gifted teacher. Even though he has taught an unusually wide range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, he brings to each course an infectious enthusi asm and energy, an encyclopedic knowledge and a remarkable capacity to articulate his thoughts and his learning. For Thomas Cleary, good teaching involves sharing a delight in what is worth knowing and understanding.

Beginning in the 1980’s, Thomas Cleary established himself as a champion of good teaching in the university community. He worked consistently with the Learning and Teaching Centre and at the Departmental and Faculty level. In 1992, he became Chair of the University of Victoria Task Force on Teaching which was established to assess the status of teaching at the University and to make recommendations for its improvement and recognition. In addition to guiding the Committee, he drafted the original report and defended the final version before the various faculty bodies. He is a regular member of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee in the Department of English and remains one of the Department’s most dependable and trusted peer reviewers of classroom teaching.

William Coleman is a committed, organized, creative and compelling teacher. He has an outstanding record in the classroom as attested to by his students – through their ratings – and by colleagues with whom he frequently team teaches. He has a scholarly approach to his teaching, learning from others and then applying those insights to his own courses. Despite his active and demanding scholarly program, he has always sought to put students and their learning first. His teaching has been recognized on a number of occasions in a more formal way through the teaching awards of the McMaster Students Union. He won the MSU teaching award for the Faculty of Social Sciences twice in 1980-81 and again in 1986. In 1986, he also won the MSU Overall Teaching Award as best instructor on campus.

William Coleman frequently attends teaching and learning workshops and given the opportunity, he presents his own findings through a seminar or workshop. In 1992, he worked with the University Committee on Teaching and Learning to introduce a new university-wide policy on the Recognition and Reward of Teaching. This policy introduced the use of teaching dossiers to McMaster and provided for the new President’s Awards for teaching, first offered in 1992. In the same year, he chaired a committee with the responsibility for introducing “Theme Schools” – an innovative approach to teaching and learning that involves students in the research of an interdisciplinary team of faculty members around a theme, and that utilizes self-directed learning.

William Hallett is well known as an exceptional teacher. He is enthusiastic, well-prepared, highly organized and extremely competent. He relates well to students, challenging, engaging and exciting them, and as a result, student ratings of his teaching are consistently the best in the department. He also devotes considerable attention to the ongoing improvement of his own teaching by regularly attending workshops on teaching and working continuously toward introducing new strategies. His commitment to teaching has been duly recog nized with the awarding of an OCUFA Teaching Award in 1988 and a University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1991.

For the past six years, William Hallett has also been an active member of the Senate Committee on Teaching. Together with the Centre for University Teaching, this Committee organized a three-day colloquium of workshops, demonstrations, and intense discussions of teaching on campus and how it might be improved. Under his chairmanship, the Committee also developed the first policy statement on teaching at the University, articulating the importance the University attaches to teaching and its commitment to actions and policies aimed at promoting high quality teaching. Some of William Hallett’s other work with the Centre for University Teaching has involved participation in workshops for new faculty.

John Hoddinott has been described by his colleagues as an extraordinary teacher who combines scholarship, dedication, and compassion for students inside and outside of the classroom. His teaching is always of the highest quality and the students respond well to his genuine interest in their learning experience. He teaches with great enthusiasm. Recently, he took the initiative in developing a training program for teaching assistants to improve the quality of laboratory instruction in the Department of Botany. John Hoddinott’s foresight in initiating this program has established the Department as a leader in this area within the University of Alberta.

John Hoddinott devotes an exceptional amount of his time and energy to the improvement of teaching and learning in his own department and the university at large. He has served this cause by his outstanding work on many committees, task forces, research projects, general advising, the development of policy and recommendations, strategic planning and university-wide seminars on several aspects of teaching and learning. He initiated the University of Alberta’s peer consultation program and is currently active as a peer consultant. He was also instrumental in establishing the first coordinator position of what is now University Teaching Services.

Mel Hosain is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. He received his M.Sc. in 1963 from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada and his Ph.D. in 1969 from the Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, both in Structural Engineering.

Specializing in steel and steel-concrete composite structures, he has so far supervised 27 graduate students (1 co-supervised) and authored or co- authored over 160 research papers.

Research Committees

• Member, Canadian Standard Association S16.1-Technical Committee on Steel Structures and Chair of its Subcommittee on Composite Construction.
• Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers Committee on Composite Construction.
• Professional Member of the American Institute of Steel Construction

Mel enjoys research but his first obligation has always been towards his students. His contributions as an educator have not gone unnoticed:

• At the Fall convocation in 1988, he was awarded the University of Saskatchewan’s Master Teacher Award.
• University of Saskatchewan Student’s Union (USSU)Teaching Excellence Award in 1993 (Inaugural year).
• In 1994, he was selected by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education as one of the 1994 3M Teaching Fellows.
• CCPE Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education.
• In 1995 (Inaugural year).[CCPE-Canadian Council of Professional Engineers]
• In 1997, he received the USSU Teaching Excellence Award for the second time.
• In 1999, he received the College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award.
• In April, 2000, he received the USSU Teaching Excellence Award for the third time.
• In May, 2001, he received the Engineer of the Year Award from the Saskatoon Engineering Society.
• In May, 2003, Mel received the prestigious “Outstanding Achievement Award” from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan.
• He served as the National President of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE) in 1997-98 and is a fellow of CSCE and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Mel has served as the Chair of the Saskatoon Branch of Save the Children-Canada for four years. He is also an active volunteer for the Innovators in Teaching Program – showing slides on Buildings and Bridges to grade 7 and 8 students all over the province. He is currently serving as the Faculty Advisor for the University of Saskatchewan Chapter of the Golden Key International Honour Society.

As a classroom teacher, course manager, and problem-based learning tutor, Paul Mercer has earned unusually warm praise and consistently high ratings from his students. Although already a model university teacher who is noted for his careful preparation, clarity of explanation, and infectious love of his subject, Paul Mercer never ceases to experiment with better ways of presenting material and encouraging student learning. His contributions were formally recognized by the University in 1989 when he received Western’s highest award for teaching, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Paul Mercer’s commitment to the quality of teaching and learning extends well beyond his excellence as a classroom and laboratory instructor. For over twenty years, as Chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee, he has been the Department of Physiology’s chief academic counsellor, an important voice in curriculum development, a writer of exemplary study guides and largely responsible for setting the standards for teaching in the Department. As manager of the problem-based learning approach to teaching in the Faculty of Medicine, Paul Mercer has trained and organized over 100 tutors in the use of problem-based learning. He contributes to several other instructional development courses as well.

In September, 2000, Gary moved from Simon Fraser University to the University of British Columbia to direct UBC’s Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth. He is also a member of the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine. In his 12 years at SFU, Gary Poole made a substantial contribution to the enhancement of teaching and learning. In 1992, he was appointed as the first Director of the Centre for University Teaching. In this role, he conducted orientation sessions for new faculty and teaching assistants, organized speakers and workshops on teaching effectiveness, engaged in departmental and individual consultations, published a quarterly newsletter, made available resources for teaching, and conducted research on teaching. He was an active member on several university teaching committees, including the Teaching Award Committee and the Senate Committee on University Teaching and Learning.

Peter did his early work in pure mathematics (convexity) and remained in that area for the first 10 years of his research life. In the mid 1970’s, he became interested in the applications of game theory to animal behaviour, and that led him to the study of evolutionary ecology which is his principal research area today. His interests include the modelling of behaviour in animals and plants in geographically structured populations, with particular focus on the resolution of conflict when the interests of two related individuals differ somewhat (for example, the queen and the workers in an insect colony). In what might appear at first to be an extremely complicated subject, he is continually impressed at the elegance of many of the mathematical results, and at the contribution they can make to our understanding. He is an editor of Evolutionary Ecology Research and an associate editor for the American Naturalist.

Educational Interests

His interests in education are focused on curriculum, both at the senior high school and beginning undergraduate levels. He feels that at its core, the problem of mathematics education is that the curriculum and the resource materials (both!) are conservative and unimaginative, focusing far too much on narrow, systematic technical development. A student with some aesthetic maturity would find most math courses at this level insulting, not because they are too easy (they are often not!) but because they are too pedestrian.

Having said that, he confesses that it is more difficult than it might appear to make significant changes. For him, that is a challenging problem, more difficult (and more important) than most of the work he does in mathematical biology. It requires a fundamental change in the way we understand teaching, a new metaphor. There are elements here of the zen master who knows not to aim at the target, of the artist who understands that he is not a camera.