2021-2022 STM Teaching Excellence Award

STM’s Teaching Excellence Award (TEA) annually honours an instructor who has made outstanding contributions to teaching at the College. Students, faculty, and alumni can nominate any instructor teaching in the current year, who is then invited to submit an application package, including a teaching portfolio and CV.

This year’s TEA winner is Dr. Shakti Brazier-Tompkins. Shakti was awarded the PhD in English by the University of Saskatchewan in 2017. She has taught at least 24 courses for STM since then, including Writing for Academic Success, and Literature and Composition, Reading Drama, Narrative, and Culture. These are marking-heavy first-year courses in which a wide variety of students enrol, which makes Shakti’s successes in them all the more notable. The committee noted her strong student and peer evaluations, her well-constructed syllabi and accessible assignments and handouts, her innovative use of teaching technologies, her careful comments on student work, and other evidence of student success, including notes from grateful students. STM is lucky to benefit from Shakti’s outstanding teaching, and we are so happy to confer on her the 2021-2022 Teaching Excellence Award.

Honorable Mentions
Amanda Devitt and Oksana Dudko. Both of these instructors are fairly new to the college, but both presented impressive teaching portfolios, with philosophies of teaching that linked compelling pedagogical ideas to innovative classroom practices.

Amanda Devitt earned a PhD in Classics from McMaster University in 2020. As a lecturer at STM in the 2021-2022 year, Amanda has taught history and CMRS classes. The committee commented favorably on Amanda’s capacity to provoke enthusiasm for the classics, especially in engagements with primary materials.

Oksana Dudko is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Toronto and has taught courses this year in STM’s Ukrainian Studies Program. The committee was impressed by Oksana’s commitment to student learning through tenuous political times, drawing connections from their learning about the past to reading and responding to the present.