Top of their class

Within Canadian academia, there is an exclusive club that grows by no more than 10 members annually. While a debate continues among university professors and administrators as to what is the optimum balance between conducting research and teaching students, the 3M Teaching Fellowships have unabashedly recognized the importance, and celebrated the achievement, of great university teaching. Created in 1986 through a partnership between the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada, the award recognizes faculty members at universities across the country for their exceptional contribution to teaching and learning. “The 3M Fellowships were not conceived to pit research against teaching,” says program coordinator Arshad Ahmad, a Concordia University business professor and a 3M fellow himself. “Instead, the idea was to advocate ways in which student learning could be promoted.”

Since 2006, Maclean’s has proudly been the program’s media sponsor. This year, as the program marks its 25th anniversary, 10 more professors join the 3M Fellows club. We profile them here.

Spend an hour with Olenka Bilash and you won’t be surprised to hear that one Cree community has nicknamed her “Opastosew,” or whirlwind. The child of a working-class Manitoba family of Ukrainian immigrants, Bilash grew up with a front-row seat for processes of language acquisition, change, and loss.

Today, as coordinator of second languages and international education in the U of A’s department of secondary education, she is a globally recognized mentor whose B-SLIM model (Bilash’s Success-Guided Language Instructional Model) for second-language instruction is used from Japan to Cameroon. It’s no coincidence that one Facebook group created by her ex-students is cheekily called “B-SLIM for World Domination.”

Ask her about her teaching mission, and she will dart amongst anecdotes, maxims, and theories at dizzying speed, frequently pausing, if you can call it that, to break down the etymology of items of technical jargon or even of familiar words like “understand.” She’s comfortable with pedagogical theoreticians from L.S. Vygotsky to Howard Gardner; one of her strong intellectual influences is Paulo Freire, the Brazilian anti-colonialist who criticized the teacher-student distinction as authoritarian and urged teachers to view education as the “practice of freedom.” But she remains anchored to a timeless, humanistic faith in the student. “The truth of the matter is, people want to think,” she says. “As teachers, we have to ask how we can create the opportunity to make that happen.”

Bilash has taught educational psychology and theory to aspiring second-language instructors in a myriad of contexts. Over the years, she has trained everybody from English teachers working with the rising middle class in Asia to Albertans outside of the university system helping the children and grand-children of immigrants reclaim their “own” ancestral languages. She has played a particularly celebrated role in the fight to preserve Canada’s threatened Aboriginal tongues. “I’ve always been interested in languages and been privileged to travel and study abroad,” she says. “But then you come home and say, well, hold on: for these languages, this is ‘abroad.’ ”

—Colby Cosh

Clare Hasenkampf stands at the front of the classroom, arms aloft, holding a pair of purple and burgundy homemade sock puppets resembling elongated sausage links. Meant to represent chromosomes, Hasenkampf ties and unties the various links, joining them together to form new patterns, as the chromosomes become hybrids of each other. This, explains the biology professor, is meiosis. Speaking in an excited voice that reveals her fascination with the subject, she says: “When meiosis occurs in our bodies, brand-new, never-before-seen-on-the-planet DNA molecules are created. It’s really amazing.” Students can’t help but be mesmerized by her boundless energy.

As an undergrad at Loyola University in her hometown of New Orleans, however, Hasenkampf didn’t immediately click with biology. There was too much memorization and no application. It wasn’t until third year, when she connected with genetics professor Ken Shull and got to work on a project in his lab, that she found her “passion for biology,” which led to her mission “to get students jazzed earlier.”

In her Introductory Biology class, Hasenkampf does exactly that, getting students involved in the research process early, testing hypotheses, and analyzing data. Meanwhile, she has given her third-year genetics students more control over their lab work. In the past, lab technicians did much of the prep work and part of the experiments. Now students have hands-on access, getting four different stocks of drosophila flies and determining the inheritance patterns of the genes they are tracking. Observes Hasenkampf: “You’d be surprised how much more this gives them ownership of the experiment.”

Hasenkampf has also responded to the many undergrads who feel left out of the research process. She came up with the idea of a Centre for Science Engagement through which students can engage in service learning. Students apply classroom knowledge to real-life, community-based initiatives by teaching high school students, tutoring first year biology students, and more. “If you can get students to switch over, to think of themselves as a young professional in their area, there’s a night-and-day difference,” says Hasenkampf. “Then the battle is won.”

—Robert Near

It would be an understatement to suggest that Elizabeth Wells is simply another well liked professor. For example, while kicking off a concert to showcase performances by students enrolled in her popular course on the Beatles last April, she began her introduction by announcing: “I’m Dr. Elizabeth Wells.” Before she could get another word out, the room shouted back: “Best professor ever!”

Such praise for Wells, a Toronto native whose mother has been a church soloist for as long as she can remember, stems from one simple philosophy: “that learning occurs between people, not between people and course material.”

To promote the concept, Wells relentlessly engages students inside the classroom and outside by infusing personal stories and anecdotes from her life and career, including a stint in public broadcasting and another as a production stage manager for the Eastman Opera Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. She strives to interact with students one-on-one so that “they really get what I’m saying.” And they do. “Every day, every topic, Elizabeth brings insight, urgency and life into unlikely places within the study of music,” says former student Andrea Warren.

Three years ago, Wells took a unique approach to resolve an ongoing problem. While teaching a first-year foundation course for music majors, precious class time was being spent answering students’ questions about the syllabus and what was expected ofthem on certain assignments. So Wells set up a camera with a colleague and started shooting short videos. Lasting no more than five minutes, she explained each assignment while standing in relevant locations, such as outside the Sackville Tribune Post for a newsrelated project. She didn’t think anybody would really watch them—she was wrong. “People in other classes started watching them, then they wanted me to do more.” Since her acting debut she has added additional videos, including one on plagiarism and another on professionalism. All of which leaves more time in class to study a topic that is music to her ears.

—Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze

When Jean Nicolas first joined the faculty of mechanical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1978, he hadn’t received any formal training in how to teach a university-level class. It doesn’t appear to have hampered him: Nicolas is recognized as one of the best educators in Canada. But he believes it’s a mistake to underestimate the importance of strong teaching and other practical skills, even in research-driven graduate studies. Through an innovative program at Sherbrooke, he’s working to correct that.

Today, many doctoral students won’t stay in academia, he says; they’ll join the wider workforce. “We need to create a doctorate that’s relevant to that,” says Nicolas, who also holds a position at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. After a stint as vice-rector of research at Sherbrooke, when he observed a variety of disciplines, Nicolas ushered ina series of workshops on topics including scientific writing, intellectual property, and yes, teaching skills. Students from a range of disciplines—engineering, medicine, the sciences—take part.

This cross-pollination of ideas is at the base of Nicolas’s teaching philosophy; while training engineers, he’ll bring in outside experts, or deploy techniques that might be more common in a humanities class. “Instead of saying, ‘this is how you do it,’ we’ll collaborate,” he says. Students leave with new skills, and as Nicolas observes, are “inspired to look into different jobs, or directions for their research. It motivates them.” A change in direction led Hugo Douville, 35, to leave the Université de Sherbrooke’s Ph.D. program in 2007 before graduating in order to cofound his own company, Cadens Imaging, in Granby, Que. But the training he received was crucial, says Douville: “It provided a base of all the missing elements.” Other universities in the province are now looking at emulating the program.

Beyond Nicolas’s innovative approach to doctoral training, colleagues and peers praise his boundless enthusiasm and passion for teaching. “It doesn’t matter what he’s teaching,” says Douville. “He never fails to get students hooked on the material.”

—Kate Lunau