Teaching and research awards
Recipients of the 2014 teaching and research awards.
Teaching Awards
Dr James McKinnon
Senior lecturer, School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr James McKinnon has planned and designed his Theatre courses to help students learn. As programme director, he oversaw a curriculum review to improve the Theatre major, evaluating courses, redesigning them where appropriate and amending the major. He has also developed a moderation process to enhance the programme’s teaching quality. His assessment design includes responses to readings, practical group work and peer reviewed assessment tasks. Student feedback indicates that the peer-review component of the course has been successful, which supports his approach of informing students of the reason for having group work and peer review. His assessment design also reflects and incorporates student feedback, for example, by responding to requests for incentives to complete weekly readings, which raised reading compliance significantly. Dr McKinnon’s approach to assessment in class time reflects research showing the importance of active learning in helping students reach learning objectives.
Dr Ross Woods
Lecturer, School of Languages and Cultures
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr Ross Woods has used educational research to develop his 100-level Spanish course to improve the student learning environment. The development of the course was initiated by a rapid growth in student numbers, which required a move away from the traditional small-group approach favoured in language teaching. By using clickers in these larger classes, active learning was maintained, with new concepts reinforced through in-class exercises. Students could still work in pairs or groups and receive instant feedback, and the lecturer could immediately gauge the success of the lecture. Dr Woods was also involved in piloting an early alerts system, which sent an email to low-achieving or disengaged students. By adapting the generic messages to the context of SPAN 111, he was able to engage with struggling students and work with them to improve grades. Students appreciated these initiatives and this was reflected in their feedback.
Teaching Excellence Awards
Professor Dale Carnegie
School of Engineering and Computer Science
Faculty of Engineering
Professor Dale Carnegie is a dedicated teacher whose teaching practice is fully informed by educational research. He engages personally with students to maintain their attention and energy throughout lectures. Students are provided with comprehensive notes spanning the entire course and a copy of all presented slides with key words missing that the students need to fill in. Assessments are a careful blend of graduated formative work and summative tasks. Students value the lecture experience and attendance is normally 100 percent. Professor Carnegie’s motivation and passion for his students is supported by the evidence in his portfolio, his teaching performance profile scores and the large number of successful postgraduate students he has supervised. He has led the development of the Electronics and Computer Systems Engineering specialisation, including the design of seven laboratory environments and associated equipment. Professor Carnegie has also led national research into student retention in engineering and recently hosted an international education conference.
Dr Sally Hill
Head of School of Languages and Cultures
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr Sally Hill shares her passion and enthusiasm for Italian and for communicating across languages and cultures with her students, supporting them to take risks and learn from their mistakes as they gain knowledge and critical thinking, linguistic and intercultural skills. She celebrates te reo Māori in her classes, for example, by pairing Māori and Italian words using the Te Kupu o Te Wiki programme. Dr Hill makes effective use of technology in teaching, as in her Second Life immersion project in which students interact in real time with native speakers in virtual Italian environments. She also provides opportunities for hands-on, real-world learning experiences, involving everything from cooking to theatre. Her excellent teaching performance profile scores indicate her teaching success. In addition, Dr Hill’s portfolio and record of innovation show that she uses formal and informal student evaluations to reflect on, and continuously improve, her teaching in direct response to the needs of learners.
Dr Rob Keyzers
Senior lecturer, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences
Faculty of Science
Dr Rob Keyzers has, over a range of courses each year, been sustaining excellence in teaching practice and has been particularly successful in engaging students in first-year chemistry courses. He communicates clearly to retain the attention of non-major and international students. He utilises active learning techniques and technologies, such as the GoSoapBox programme, which allows students to use smartphones to respond to quizzes and pose anonymous questions on the course content. He has also restructured the organic chemistry components and courses to provide a clear scaffolding from 100 to 300 level and worked to replace outdated laboratory machines. Dr Keyzers’ teaching portfolio provides evidence that his students appreciate his efforts and that managers in industry have appreciated the skills his students have learnt in class, which have facilitated a seamless transition into professional workplaces.
Dr Azra Moeed
Senior lecturer
Faculty of Education
Dr Azra Moeed has demonstrated sustained excellence in teaching practice over multiple courses and brings passion and enthusiasm to teaching while respecting the diverse backgrounds of her students. Identifying students’ learning needs and responding to them in her teaching ensures that all students participate and learn from her classes. Through mentoring, her student teachers develop the ability to teach science by caring for students and their learning. By providing ongoing support throughout their academic and professional careers, Dr Moeed builds strong relationships with her students. She has clearly demonstrated this teaching philosophy in her portfolio. She provided evidence of how this connection with former students has allowed her to develop a network of science teachers—former students who provide mentoring to other student teachers. With help from Dr Moeed, these teachers are researching their own teaching practices and are building a culture of research-led teaching in schools to enhance science learning.
Lisa Terreni
Senior lecturer
Faculty of Education
Lisa Terreni is an energetic and creative teacher whose contribution reaches well beyond students in the Early Childhood Education programmes offered by the Faculty of Education. She has worked to develop a greater sense of community at the Faculty by regularly organising events and exhibitions. This work acknowledges the contributions students and staff make to the learning environment and helps to invigorate the Karori campus. She actively engages with students to share her wide knowledge and experience of early childhood education in a range of areas—visual art education, multiliteracy education, diversity and social justice. She is also committed to regularly providing professional development and leadership for the wider early childhood professional community, sharing her ideas, research and expertise. A visual artist herself, the core of her teaching philosophy is that teaching itself is an art form. For Lisa Terreni, art can inspire teaching, and teaching can inspire art.
Early Career Research Awards
Dr Sasha Calhoun
Senior lecturer, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Dr Sasha Calhoun’s research centres on the uses of prosody in language, that is, what we convey through stress, phrasing and tune. Much of her work looks at English, but more recently she has expanded this to other languages, including Samoan, Venezuelan Spanish, Pakistani English and Québécois French—some of this in collaboration with colleagues internationally and students she has been supervising. Dr Calhoun joined Victoria in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh, where she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2010, she has published in highly ranked journals, including Language, Speech Communication, Journal of Phonetics, Language and Cognitive Processes and the de Gruyter Mouton series ‘Interface Explorations’. She has also been invited to speak at workshops internationally. In 2014, Dr Calhoun became the director of the Linguistics programme. She has been closely involved in expanding the undergraduate programme and in initiatives aimed at increasing the profile of linguistics among secondary school students.
Inbal Megiddo
Senior lecturer
Te Kōki New Zealand School of Music
Inbal Megiddo’s primary field of research is in cello performance. As a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician, she has built an international reputation, frequently performing in New Zealand and internationally and collaborating with major orchestras, conductors and performers at concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center in New York, the Philharmonie in Berlin, and La Monnaie in Brussels. She is committed to expanding the cello repertoire by working with contemporary composers and discovering lost, underperformed or suppressed works. Inbal Megiddo has given world and national premieres of important works, including, most recently, the cello concertos of Mieczyslav Weinberg, Heitor Villa Lobos and Samuel Barber. Additional areas of research are music and conflict, with a focus on music written during, and in response to, World War II, music and identity in the Middle East, an exploration of New Zealand identity in culture and music and instrumental pedagogy.
Dr Franck Natali
Senior lecturer, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences
Faculty of Science
Dr Franck Natali has devoted his early research to the study of epitaxial growth, a process that consists of depositing very precise amounts of material onto substrates that are used to design and create the newest electronic devices used in everyday life. During the course of his research, Dr Natali has worked on a large number of different metallic and semiconductor materials in industrial and academic contexts, and is now focusing on a new class of materials, the rare-earth nitrides. Such materials could lead to a new generation of electronic devices, called spintronics devices, which are faster and more reliable, yet consume less power than conventional electronics. Supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden fund, Dr Natali is one of the researchers at the forefront of this field, having achieved recent significant breakthroughs towards developing and constructing spintronics devices.
Research Excellence Awards
Simon Davy
Head of School and associate professor of Biological Sciences
Faculty of Science
Simon Davy is at the forefront of research into the cell biology and physiology of the coral-algal symbiosis that underlies the success of coral reefs, and its response to environmental stress. He also studies coral disease and is a pioneer in the field of coral virology. Coral reefs are under threat of extinction from climate change, pollution and over-exploitation. Simon Davy’s lab is one of the largest of its type in the world, with three postdoctoral fellows, 18 PhD students and 16 MSc students in the last six years. During this same period, he has been awarded two successive Marsden grants, totalling nearly $2 million, and has published 57 peer-reviewed papers (from a total of 72) and one specialist textbook, for Oxford University Press. He is vice-president of the International Symbiosis Society, and an editor for the journals Coral Reefs and Frontiers in Microbiology.
Dr Gina Grimshaw
Senior lecturer, School of Psychology
Faculty of Science
Dr Gina Grimshaw leads the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience lab in the School of Psychology. Her team of postdoctoral, postgraduate, Honours, and undergraduate students study the cognitive and neurological processes that allow us to perceive, interpret and respond to emotional information and to control our emotional responses. She played an important role in establishing the cognitive neuroscience research facility in the School, which allows researchers to use neuroscience methods such as eye tracking, brain stimulation and recordings of neural activity to further our understanding of the mind. She has a strong commitment to public engagement, and shares her research through public talks and the media. Her research has been supported by the Royal Society’s Marsden Fund and the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand.
Kate Hunter
Associate professor, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Over more than a decade of teaching, research and public engagement, Kate Hunter has built an international reputation as a leading historian of the Great War. Kate’s focus on the social, cultural and emotional history of the conflict distinguishes her work from more traditional military approaches. Her substantial publication record includes her most recent book, Holding on to Home: New Zealand Stories and Objects of the First World War, a collaboration with the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa, launched in August 2014. Her leadership role has been particularly marked in the area of postgraduate recruitment into World War I scholarship, with several of her students producing research of sufficient quality and originality to be published in international peer-reviewed journals.
Paul Jose
Associate professor, School of Psychology and Director of the Roy McKenzie Centre for the Study of Families
Faculty of Science
Dr Paul Jose conducts research on the contextual and individual factors that foster healthy development of children, adolescents and families. For example, his recent research has highlighted the importance of social connectedness, particularly family and school connectedness, in fostering positive youth development. Dr Jose has obtained over $6 million in external grant support for his research activities, obtaining funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Ministry of Social Development, the Health Research Council and two Marsden grants from the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published more than 100 journal articles, books, book chapters and government reports based on the data collected over his 35 years in the field of developmental psychology. He is the current president of the Australasian Human Development Association and is an associate editor of the top-tier journal, Developmental Psychology.
Professor Miriam Lips
Chair in e-Government, School of Government
Faculty of Commerce
As the inaugural Chair in e-Government at Victoria University of Wellington, one of the first e-government chairs in the world, Professor Miriam Lips has demonstrated international thought leadership by building, developing and shaping an emerging scholarly field of critical importance for the digital future of governments around the world. She has demonstrated excellence in both fundamental and applied research, evidenced by an ‘A’ score in the recent PBRF round and several commissioned research projects with a substantial impact on public policy; in teaching excellence, demonstrated by setting up a new e-Government Master’s programme that is unique worldwide; and by excellence in research-informed development activities, proven by the delivery of a range of successful conferences, public seminars and keynote lectures. Further evidence of Professor Lips’ research-based thought leadership was recently provided by her role as an appointed member of the New Zealand Data Futures Forum by the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Statistics.
Professor John Pratt
Director of the Institute of Criminology, School of Social and Cultural Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor John Pratt was the recipient of the Mason Durie Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2013, awarded ‘annually to the nation’s pre-eminent social scientist … for advancing the field of the sociology of punishment and comparative penology’. His book, Contrasts in Punishment, published by Routledge in 2013 and facilitated by a James Cook Research Fellowship, was the culmination of eight year’s research that won international recognition, acclaim and awards. This included a fellowship at New York University and invited lectures in Europe, North and South America and Asia. As director of the Institute of Criminology, he has contributed to the Victoria research environment by, for example, organising and hosting a conference featuring the Institute and criminologists from Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2014, and successfully mentoring staff members to apply for prestigious research awards or in finding highly ranked publishing outlets for their research.
Dr Sydney Shep
Reader in Book History and Printer
Wai-te-ata Press
Dr Sydney Shep is acknowledged internationally as a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of transnational and cross-cultural book history and print culture, in the contexts of the histories of empire, technology and reading. She is also recognised for shifting humanities research away from a single investigator producing a sole-authored print monograph to a multidisciplinary team environment that harnesses the affordances of digital tools and resources to create dynamic e-humanities research collaboratories and interactive online scholarly publications. As the recipient of three Marsden grants, numerous overseas research fellowships and senior executive appointments within several international scholarly associations, Dr Shep continues to demonstrate leadership in building research capability across the university and linking outward to the New Zealand cultural heritage sector as well as the Australasian e-research communities.