Malgorzata Dubiel, of the Mathematics Department in Simon Fraser University, is dedicated to teaching mathematics at all levels, to all ages, in all kinds of settings, from market place to mall. Her verbal inventions, The Taste of Pi, Math Camps, Math in the Mall, and Changing the Culture, illustrate her determination to transform attitudes to numeracy. An educational leader, Malgorzata Dubiel’s outreach work has transformed the teaching of mathema-tics and math readiness throughout the entire province. “She is a giant in teaching.”

Malgorzata‘s sets problems that are quirky, delightfully teasing. She breaks into new worlds of myth and magic by inviting them to help Gary slay, in less than ten strokes of an enchanted sword, a magic dragon with three heads and three tails who grows more body parts each time one is cut off—mathematical magic.

Malgorzata instills confidence in those who learn with her. Surveys say that before her math courses, 61% of the entering students lacked confidence in their mathematical skills. After her class, however, 0% lack confidence; 98% are secure in their skills. Her students remark on her integrity, passion, and determination. “Math becomes beautiful!”

As a gardener’s success is measured by the seed’s bearing fruit, Kate believes student learning is the only measure of effective teaching.

Students and colleagues delight in her humour, generosity, and devotion. They call her “the heart and soul of teaching and learning at UNB Saint John.” The list of Kate’s accomplishments is inspiring. She has laid the groundwork for a rich teaching and learning environment: founder and for 11 years the editor of the campus teaching newsletter; chair since 1995 of the Vice-President’s Teaching Excellence Committee; inaugural recipient of her university’s educational leadership award; the only person to receive both of the Atlantic region’s teaching and leadership awards.

A persistent and passionate advocate for teaching excellence, as director of graduate studies in Biology, Kate encourages the department’s graduate students to complete UNB’s Diploma in University Teaching, which she was instrumental in making accessible to the campus.

Kate Frego is a cherished professor who loves what she does. “We view her with great campus affection,” says a former student.

Sorel Friedman teaches English language and culture to a new generation of diverse students, francophone and others, in a French-language university— with astounding results.

Sorel’s innovations are pathways for any educator who wants to use technology to leverage learning. She is not only fluent “digitally,” reaching students with multimedia, chats, blogs, and videos, but she prompts them to express their learning with the tools they already know, commanding their attention and unleashing their creativity. Sorel is the architect of student podcast productions. She invites them to participate in social bookmarking on the web. She engages students in iTunesU, which allows her to comment on oral presentations.

Motivating and inspiring students is a hallmark of Sorel’s many effective teaching strategies. Students are hooked in real time outside the three-hour class, beyond the 15-week semester. They engage with newsworthy topics, even issues of historical significance. She immerses students globally with their own digital tools.

Teaching on the front lines and connecting students, on their own terms, to all aspects of their language and cultural development have earned Sorel two prix d’excellence en enseignement and the admiration of her peers. Students echo their praise: “She got me to finally love the English language”…”c’est une professeure idéale”… the most talented and passionate teacher that I ever had.”

Robert Lapp doesn’t just teach, says a former student, he “dances”!

A professor of literature, Robert Lapp breathes life into Victorian and Romantic poetry”, reading it aloud for his students as an invitation to lift their eyes from the page and, with a “raised ear,” to engage in the challenging texts. Students flock to his classes. Audiences fill high school gymnasia when he and a colleague weave drama, music, and poetry into an interdisciplinary event.

Reaching out to the community, Robert leads initiatives to enhance links between Mount Allison’s English department and local schools. He models what teaching dedication really means. For Robert, being a teacher means realizing there are no answers, only better phrasings of the questions. Exploration is at the heart of learning.

Already the recipient of institutional and regional teaching awards that recognize his uncompromising passion for teaching and learning, Robert also personifies educational leadership and engagement through his influential workshops and mentorship: “He has changed the way I teach,” says one colleague.

His nominator describes Robert as a gem who radiates joy, generosity, and excitement for his discipline: “Stand beside Robert and you bask in the reflected glow.”

In 2006, TA Loeffler was named one of the Twenty Most Influential Women in Sport and Physical Activity in Canada by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport. As a mountaineer, she has scaled peaks such as Denali and Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest peaks in North and South America, and made an attempt on Everest.

Using technology, TA teaches from the mountain tops. Over 10,000 Newfoundland schoolchildren have been inspired by TA’s mountaineering and by the challenges she poses to them: “Find your personal Everest and start climbing.”

TA often divides her classes into groups, providing each group with a fresh egg, 25 straws, and ten feet of masking tape. “Build a cradle in such a way that when dropped from a great height, the egg will not break.” Once, while TA was scaling Memorial University’s tallest building, a security guard demanded, “Come down, immediately!” “I can’t!” she replied, “I still have three more eggs to drop!”

“The best professor I ever had! The most inspiring woman ever!”

For more than thirty years, Peter Mahaffy has dished up molecular gastronomy to the chemistry-starved while leading the chemistry-phobic into encounters with everyday science that empower them to make the world a better place.

Exposing the profound historical and philosophical roots that are feeding chemistry’s 21st century fruits, he has worked with numerous local, national and international partners to weave an innovative web of knowledge-sharing across disciplines and cultures. At his own university and in diverse global settings, he helps learners see and understand the complex and dynamic transformations that take place in chemistry’s “middle world,” between the infinitely small and the infinitely large.

Peter’s quest for the “Pedagogical Stone” creates its own complex and dynamic transformations as learners develop new understanding of the implications of scientific actions and reactions. This transformation occurs, for example, as he helps to guide the celebrated Flying Chemist Program, providing emerging countries with expertise to improve teaching and learning of Chemistry.

The temptation to welcome Peter Mahaffy to the 3M National Teaching Fellowships as our 3M Flying Fellow is impossible to resist.

The whole world seeks out Dan Pratt. His work in the area of teaching perspectives has reached more than 65,000 educators and students in 105 countries, and exists in several languages. His discipline is not only a research passion, but his way of life.

In his teaching philosophy, Dan talks about the values which underlie his work to build a relationship with each learner: “My students come to me with experience and expertise that I can only envy . . . They are the captains of ships that I have never sailed . . . I need to establish a learning environment where it is safe to take risks, to try out tentative understanding . . . I also have to park my ego at the door and enter with a generous portion of humility for what they know that I do not know yet.”

Students write, “You are a light at UBC . . . kind, caring and passionate . . . a master at work!” A winner of the Killam Teaching Award, Dan has been a consummate advocate of curriculum and organizational development and of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

To no one’s surprise, Dan Pratt continues to influence and shape higher education, earning the praise of his peers around the globe and bringing out the best in his learners.

Chari wants the university to stop being a mere teaching shop, serving immediate rather than long term needs. He sees the university as a forum for disciplined dissent in which it is the professor’s task to create a cadre of enthusiastic trouble-makers who will take society by the scruff of the neck and force it to examine real not perceived needs.

He is an expert on problem-based learning, to which he was converted, after some preliminary doubts. His problem-setting skills inspire his students to write of him in glowing terms: “Thank you Chari, for allowing us to explore, free from the chains of boring professors and memorized exams.” For Chari, the university is a privileged space in which the autonomous learner should be free to explore new answers to even newer fields, not memorizing old answers to even older problems.

Chari talks dangerous talk, talk that can inflame our universities and set them and their students where they deserve to be: at the cutting edge of intellectual development in Canada. This world, according to Chari, is a world worth striving for.

Mercedes Rowinsky-Geurts is characterized by her students as energetic, passionate, and compassionate. Students are part of her extended family. For her, students are even more important than the act of teaching itself.

Her passion in class is legendary, and she uses objects, like colourful, hand-made Mexican masks, to introduce her students to the symbolic mysteries of mask-making and mask-painting. They come to experience, thereby, the Spanish language and Mexican culture with all their senses.

Her teaching and research career is marked by a compassionate rigour that allows her to reach out, beyond her subject matter, with a vital energy that touches other people’s lives. Her workshops and presentations are renowned, and her nominators speak of “her vital commanding presence, of her particular energy, of her joie de vivre, her Latin flair, and her utter dedication to her students.” As she writes of herself: “The passion continues!”

For over 35 years at the University of Western Ontario, Jim Silcox has been teaching future doctors that their patients are human beings, not just constellations of symptoms. Over these years, Jim has balanced demanding administrative positions with excellent, award-winning teaching and humanitarian work. Rich teaching experiences informed his four years as Director of the Faculty Development Office at Western, where he reached over 1,200 medical and dental faculty annually.

Jim’s imaginative clinical teaching inspires students, but keeps them hungry for more. He strives to create a sense of “mpassioned intuitiveness, watching the pleasure that students take from the discovering information for themselves and from recognizing that they have the capacity to integrate that knowledge into their own personal style of communicating.”

Jim has won more than 20 teaching awards. He has a premier teaching room named after him. His approach has inspired the creation of the Jim Silcox Award, given annually to two students who embody the Silcox spirit of passion, honesty, and humanity.