Each year Killam Teaching Prizes are awarded to UBC faculty who exemplify the university’s commitment to teaching and learning best practices.  With the call for nominations now open for 2012 we’d like to take this opportunity to shine the spotlight on one of the 2011 award recipients from the Faculty of Science – Dr. Sara Harris.

A Senior Instructor within UBC’s Department of Earth and Ocean Science, Dr. Harris has been expanding the minds of UBC students since 2005. She feels fortunate that the timing of her arrival at UBC gave her a chance to get her feet on the ground before jumping into involvement with the then-new Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative.  She credits being part of this initiative with helping her improve as a teacher (and learner) far faster and more effectively than she would have been able to had she been working on her own.  Teaching with intention, using evidence about how people learn, implementing practices that have been shown to be effective, creating new learning opportunities and testing them all make the process of teaching continually fascinating for Dr. Harris. On winning a Killam teaching prize, she remarked "It's a thrill.  It's an affirmation of past effort, it's a heartening reminder of UBC's commitment to teaching and learning, and...it's a motivating challenge, an inspiration to do things better as an educator". 

Dr. Harris grew up in Oregon, USA, completed a B.A. in Earth Science at Wesleyan University and a PhD in Oceanography at Oregon State.  She then had the opportunity to sail on two legs with the Ocean Drilling Program as a sedimentologist and stratigrapher.  One cruise was in the tropical Atlantic and the other in the southwest Pacific, where she received her first and only taste of 10-meter waves!  Even though she admits to a tendency to seasickness, she spent the next seven years as a chief scientist at Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying modern oceans and sailing thousands of miles with undergraduate students.  SEA exemplifies experiential learning in a way that is difficult to replicate.  It was there that she began thinking more about issues of effective teaching and learning, but not until arriving at UBC did she begin to actively pursue her interest in developing new teaching best practices.

Video: Dr. Sara Harris - UBC Killam Teaching Prize

The Dean’s Office of each Faculty at UBC administers its own Killam Teaching Prize applications from nominations provided by colleagues, current students, or alumni. If you are interested in nominating a UBC faculty member please visit your Faculty website for nomination guidelines and specific deadlines.  More information and lists of previous winners can be found on the website of the Office of the Provost and Vice President Academic.

The Faculty of Graduate Studies administers one award from this larger pool of teaching prizes specifically for graduate education. The evaluation criteria and eligibility requirements for the Killam Teaching Prizes awarded by other UBC faculties will vary from the requirements for the graduate teaching prize. Again, nominators may wish to contact their home faculty to review those requirements. Academic units (UBC-V departments or schools) are invited to submit one nomination for the Killam Teaching Prize for Graduate Instruction to the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  The deadline for submission of nominations is 4:00pm on Friday, March 2, 2012.  Complete eligibility criteria and nomination procedures are available on the Graduate Studies website.