WATE PGR 2016 Winners and Commendees
2016 Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates who Teach Winners
Physics |
Throughout Greg's time researching Astronomy here at Warwick, he has taken every opportunity to engage in a wide range of teaching and outreach projects. From undergraduate laboratory demonstrating to his work overseeing the Physics department's inflatable planetarium, he has enjoyed developing his skills and helping to encourage others to do the same. He places a strong focus on providing a friendly and welcoming environment while promoting collaboration between students. He hopes to continue to engage with the local community through a wide variety of outreach events and relishes the opportunity to take on the responsibility of undergraduate lecturing in future positions. Greg delivered one of the 2016 Warwick Christmas Lectures. |
Statistics |
Christiane is a third year student at the Department of Statistics where she spends most of her time doing research in algebraic statistics. Over the past six years, she has been teaching problem classes on numerical mathematics, linear algebra, probability theory, and mathematical techniques to undergraduates in Germany, at Warwick, and to secondary school children in Africa last summer. She believes that good communication between the students and the teacher is essential to effective teaching and that mathematical rigour and logic helps you to be precise in your thinking and to develop a better understanding of the world around you. |
Life Sciences |
John worked with the Koentges Lab to bring research into the classroom. Dozens of students were engaged as active researchers in annotation and exploration of huge datasets. John developed bespoke tools and infrastructure to divide samples between students and to collate their work into enormous and fantastically detailed analyses of bone developmental biology. Students acted as a true research team, and were even able to push the concept further than anticipated through identification and description of previously unseen phenomena. This work demonstrates the viability of ‘crowd-sourcing’ large research tasks in the classroom, and how this benefits both education and research. |
WBS |
Lauren has taught undergraduate management seminars for Foundations of Organisational Behaviour and Management, Organisation and Society at Warwick Business School. Her approach to teaching is to make each seminar interactive, creative, and, most importantly, fun. She encourages her students to think critically, and often employs art and other mediums of culture to explore business theory in new ways. She enjoys interacting with her students, and is delighted when they suggest a new television show or movie to analyse. Lauren’s enthusiasm and commitment to enrich her student’s learning make her an outstanding influence in a positive Warwick experience. |
PAIS |
Lisa's research-led teaching – and her teaching-led research – work towards connecting the ‘field’ and the classroom in a more meaningful way in the study of political economy and international development. Her research and pedagogy have also been broadly informed by the collective struggle to ‘decolonise’ knowledge, which involves the recovery of, and engagement with, global perspectives and the work of global thinkers. Both in her role as Associate Editor of the online teaching resource ‘Global Social Theory’ and through her classroom activities, she works towards a more rigorous and inclusive pedagogy which engages students who feel as though their own histories and intellectuals have been consistently written out of the landscape of academic knowledge. |
2016 Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates who Teach Commendees
Tobias Eriksson Physics |
Tobias is a final year postgraduate student in the Physics department. He has always enjoyed teaching and not just teaching Physics. Although his greatest contribution has been his four years in the second year Electronics lab, before he became a postgraduate demonstrator he was a private tutor in Banbury, a chess coach in Coventry, and an athletics coach in Sweden. In teaching he tries to focus on the real issues and problems the students face, without wasting their time trying to figure out why the lab equipment isn’t working, when they’ve forgotten to turn it on. Overall he tries to make sure everyone enjoys their time in the lab. |
PAIS |
Dženeta’s research analyzes diaspora influence on a weak state in a post-conflict environment, explaining how diaspora mobilize transnationally and how host land and homeland contexts influence diaspora engagement. She integrates diaspora scholarship into the study of transitional justice. She has taught on two introductory comparative politics undergraduate modules. Having lived in multiple countries across Europe as well as the United States, she understands students often approach the study of politics in part from their own lived experiences, particularly at the beginning of their university studies. Combining seminal as well as recent scholarship and a variety of real-world examples throughout her teaching, her engaged approach reflects her commitment to integrate and incorporate diverse perspectives and approaches, building students’ critical thinking, writing, and research skills. |
Rachael Procter Physics |
Rachael's work in Physics is underpinned by her strong beliefs in developing critical thinking skills in her students, in believing in the potential of each one, and the desire to communicate her enthusiasm for physics. She is also involved in her department's outreach and widening participation activities. |
Life Sciences |
Bex's teaching compromises of laboratory demonstrations to undergraduate Biology students, but she has also had the amazing opportunity of making and delivering a lecture to first year undergraduates as well. Over the past year, she has been working towards her Postgraduate Award in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and this has been something that has really broadened her horizons as a teacher by introducing her to new teaching styles. She is a promoter of science outreach and believes both genders should be encouraged from an early age and hopes that, in time, science can be seen as accessible for everyone. As someone fairly new to teaching, she just hopes that she can continue expanding on her current knowledge and contributing to outreach projects to get people interested in a subject she is fascinated by. |
Computer Science |
As a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science with both a passion for image analysis and teaching, Greg has tutored various modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level, such as Image and Video Analysis and Foundations of Computing. Greg's philosophy is to create a friendly and bespoke learning environment through which students consider him approachable and his teaching interesting. Through his study of the Postgraduate Award: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Greg has applied a multitude of novel techniques both inside and outside the classroom to improve the student learning experience, ranging from Game-based Learning to Active Listening. Such techniques increase student interaction and improve learning further. |
See the 2016 Winners and Commendees of the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE).
You can also find out about all past winners and commendees of WATE and WATE PGR.