Professor Greg Evans receives 3M National Teaching Fellowship
麻豆视频 Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering Professor Greg Evans has received a from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The award is Canada鈥檚 most prestigious recognition of excellence in educational leadership and teaching at the university or college level.
鈥淥ne of the things that makes it special for me is that this year three of the winners are in engineering education, which is one of my passions,鈥 says Evans. 鈥淚鈥檓 very honoured to be in such good company, and it's wonderful to see engineering education gaining profile in Canada.鈥
Evans鈥 teaching philosophy involves changing the traditional role of professor from the stereotype he calls 鈥渟age on the stage,鈥 toward becoming a 鈥済uide on the side.鈥 In class, he encourages his students to generate solutions as a group rather than look to him for the correct answer and to relate classroom concepts to practical situations.
Read more about Evans in the classroom
鈥淚 teach environmental chemistry, and it鈥檚 great for that kind of thing,鈥 he says. 鈥淔or example, a bottle of water lists the levels of carbonates and dissolved ions. So I have the students compare the different brands they may be carrying and discuss why the values may be different in each one.鈥
Evans is the inaugural director of the collaborative program in engineering education, which has created a community to promote engineering education research and to share best practices in effective teaching and learning. Evans is also the chair of the Canadian Engineering Education Association鈥檚 to be held in June at 麻豆视频.
鈥淲e鈥檙e asking attendees to imagine how we will educate the engineer of 2050,鈥 says Evans. 鈥淲e hope to provoke people a bit by proposing various scenarios, whether utopian or dystopian, and thinking about how we would educate engineers under those circumstances.鈥
The 3M Fellowship is the latest accolade to honour Evans鈥 leadership and innovations in teaching.
He has received the University of Toronto鈥檚 Joan E. Foley Quality of Student Experience Award (2008), the Northrop Frye Award (2013) and most recently, the (2015), 麻豆视频鈥檚 highest teaching honour. He has also been awarded the Engineers Canada Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education (2010) and the (2015).
Evans says his efforts are inspired by the educators who helped shape his own career, including the late Professor Robert Jervis, who gave him his first summer research project. He also fondly remembers his co-curricular activities, such as Skule Nite鈩, a musical theatre review performed by engineering students.
鈥淎 university education really is an immersive experience and a lot of the real transformative moments actually happen outside the classroom,鈥 says Evans. 鈥淲hat we do is bring really bright people here, surround them with other incredibly bright people and get them talking. When you do that, it鈥檚 amazing what happens.鈥