Prof. Cynthia Weston has been a faculty member in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at McGill University since 1980. She has been a member of the teaching and learning center since 1983 and the Director of Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) since 2005. Her teaching and research over the past 30 years at McGill have focused on teaching and learning in higher education, formative evaluation, and reflection as a mechanism for constructing knowledge about teaching. Current educational development efforts emphasize multi-level initiatives designed to have a transformative impact on teaching and learning at McGill.

When presenting Cynthia with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 STLHE conference, Christopher Knapper made the following comments.

Many of you will know Cynthia as director of McGill’s Teaching and Learning Services, which I believe is Canada`s longest-established educational development centre. The centre—and Cynthia—have over the years had a seminal influence on the improvement of post-secondary teaching in Montreal, Quebec, in Canada and internationally, through their workshops, publications, research, and outreach activities. Working in a part of Canada which often saw its institutions and issues as unique, Cynthia did wonders in building bridges to the national community of developers, especially through her championing the work of STLHE at McGill and beyond.

Cynthia was nominated for the award by her colleagues, and they talk of her mentorship, her “energetic enthusiasm”, her ability to “motivate, inspire and galvanise”, to “create and guide a cohesive, collaborative and enthusiastic team to generate a powerful force for change”. They end by commenting on her “vision of a future for higher education in which teaching is valued equally to research and student learning is the metric of success” . . . “there is no-one else who has done more to further the development, improvement, and recognition of teaching at McGill and beyond”.

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.