Announcing our Five New Teaching Fellows

We are very excited to announce that five new Teaching Fellows will be joining the Teaching Fellows Program starting May 1, 2018. These outstanding faculty members will provide educational leadership in their respective Faculties and the wider campus community. Each of the Fellows will develop, implement, and assess the impact of a teaching innovation, while also supporting educational excellence within their own Faculties by providing instructional development opportunities for their colleagues.

Michael Buzzelli (Social Science) will provide new work-integrated and professional experiences for students by integrating campus and community through adopting pedagogical approaches that include: (1) term-length student group projects that are research-driven and experientially-based, (2) the professor as an embedded project member, and (3) community partners as project mentors.  

Nicole Campbell (Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry) will (1) develop an interactive visual syllabus that links program and course outcomes to teaching activities and assessments, (2) design self-assessment rubrics for students to measure their proficiency levels on Western’s core competencies, and (3) incorporate ePortfolios and online badging to support these initiatives.

Quazi Rahman (Engineering) will create interactive online modules to introduce programming languages commonly used in industry, research, and high performance computing to students from all disciplines; providing them with an enhanced online computer-programming experience to help them develop skills that are necessary for career opportunities in programming related fields.

Sophie Roland (Don Wright Faculty of Music) will enhance the way in which experiential learning is delivered in the International Summer Operatic Program, Accademia Europea dell’Opera, to match 21st century professional qualifications demand. She will (1) expand pre-departure, re-entry, and professional development modules and (2) assess the impact of the program on participants’ learning and professional skills development.

Thomas Telfer (Faculty of Law) will develop and implement a new mental health education program to raise awareness of mental health issues, reduce stigma, and build student resiliency. He will also revise an existing first-year non-credit mindfulness course in Law, creating an optional upper-year for-credit course that will support students’ personal, academic, and professional well-being through its focus on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and professionalism.

The 2018 cohort of Teaching Fellows will join the already appointed Fellows, including Angela Borchert (Arts & Humanities), Tom Haffie and Lindi Wahl (Science), Immaculate Namukasa (Education), Sandra Smeltzer (Faculty of Information and Media Studies), and David Walton (Health Science) in providing educational leadership at Western.