October Faculty Spotlight | Award Nominees

This month, we begin our Faculty Spotlight feature. We are planning to have this spotlight every month to highlight the exemplary teaching practices that are taking place in our classrooms. Highlighted this month are faculty who are nominated for Durham College’s 2019 employee awards. We asked each faculty – What is your go-to engagement teaching strategy?
Ali Taileb
Ali Taileb
SET ProfessorAli engages his students by integrating authentic real-life project examples into his courses. When delivering the curriculum, Ali ensures that all of his students are given a voice to express their ideas and opinions. This approach supports students connecting with the content in every unit.
Joyce Myers
Joyce Myers
SET ProfessorJoyce ensures that the course material remains relevant for her students. There are always new and exciting developments in the microbial world to keep her lectures current! She also injects humour into her classes; she finds that telling stories about her experiences in industry working with microbes provides comic relief!
Kevin Keays
Kevin Keays
START ProfessorKevin brings practical industry examples into his classrooms so his students can make the direct connections between what they’re learning in the class and industry practices. This includes showing videos that he makes in industry. This allows students to connect the content with real industry scenarios.Students need to know why the content that they are learning in class is relevant, so Kevin’s curriculum highlights real scenarios so students can apply the knowledge that they’ve learned in a practical way. All of Kevin’s assessments are scenario-based, requiring students to apply their critical decision-making skills. Last year, an impressive 84% of his graduates had a job in industry by the time they graduated!
Kris Felstead
Kris Felstead
MAD ProfessorKris’s favourite strategy to engage his students is to establish a culture of learning. His work with the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion included a challenge to create a website “SeeDifferent” that students would use to learn and share experiences based on the foundation of inclusion and non-discrimination.The challenge from an instructional standpoint was to cover the learning outcomes in the Portfolio class while substituting an outside initiative that fits within the learning outcomes of the class. The SeeDifferent website was vetted by students at public and junior high schools for design and user interface functionality (including all social media channels brought into one site) and was distributed as a government initiative campaign for inclusion.Adapting the learning culture was supported through a number of ways: 1) the creation of virtual meetings with the students’ schools that couldn’t attend physically; 2) mentorship “progress checkpoints” for students developing the site to provide support and direction; 3) inclusion of the SeeDifferent team in the gantt chart development cycles that included “global classroom” style discussions with students, staff and faculty at all developmental stages of the site.This project not only covered all of the learning outcomes in the curriculum, it provided students an opportunity to effect change with their peers, community, external stakeholders and the general public. Students felt they were able to “make a difference” and the classroom significance was lifted to higher levels of performance and understanding of the material supported by a confidence that the skillset that they are acquiring is indispensable to the community and Industry they will be entering upon graduation.