Senior Lecturer, Dr Suzanne Vallance’s teaching innovation in meeting the needs of students from two universities made her a winner in the Lincoln University 2019 Teaching Excellence Awards, presented recently.
Her contribution to the joint University of Canterbury-Lincoln University Master of Disaster, Risk and Resilience degree programme earned her an Innovation in Teaching award.
The programme provides the challenge of bringing students from the universities together, but Dr Vallance is commonly applauded by students for successfully meeting their varied needs.
One student gave probably the biggest accolade:
“The more I am thinking about it, the more I am leaning towards a PhD.”
Commerce lecturer Dr Mohini Vidwans also claimed an Innovation in Teaching award, with her use of current business examples from the media as cases studies for the principles she is teaching, highlighted. By the judges.
She actively seeks out and includes local business people as guests at lectures to exemplify the practices she wants students to adopt.
She is also an early adopter of online learning initiatives.
Food scientists, Professor Charles and Dr Margaret Brennan, have built a PhD research team which includes up to 15 Lincoln PhD students, numerous MSc and BSc project students and also visiting scholars from all over the world.
They believe that by fostering peer-peer interactions, and collaborative experiential learning, students benefit from pedagogical interactions from their peers, and the fun that students have in being free to explore in a friendly, non-threatening environment.
Other winners were Dr Maneesha Mohan, Food Engineering, who took an Early Career Award, with her ability to enthuse students noted and Dr Sylvia Nissen, Environmental Policy, and Applied Policy Analysis, who earned the same accolade, with her classes described as engaging, and Dr Nissen as enthusiastic in her teaching, with an exciting learning style she had ever come across.
Congratulations to all the winners.