A Conversation with 2024 3M Teaching Fellows and Their Nominators from the Maple League

Every year, the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education invites ten educational leaders to join the 3M National Teaching Fellowship. This year, Dr. Erin Austen (St. Francis Xavier University) and Dr. Heather Lawford (Bishop’s University) were invited to join the Fellowship as part of the 2024 cohort for their community minded work with their students and colleagues. In this seminar, the colleagues who supported the nomination, Dr. Angie Kolen (StFX) and Dr. Jessica Riddell (BU), will ask Dr. Austen and Dr. Lawford to reflect on their journeys as educational leaders and exceptional teachers and their future plans.

Bios:
Dr. Erin Austen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and is currently serving in the role of Department Chair. She completed a PhD in Perceptual Psychology and a postdoc in Human Kinetics and Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. After teaching for one year at Yukon College and working at the Yukon Senior’s Information Centre, she returned to her alma mater in 2005. Her research interests are varied; much of her research is connected to health and health promotion. She is also very invested in teaching and in continually improving her teaching practice while also working to create institutional supports for faculty development. She has held teaching-relevant leadership roles including Chair of the StFX Faculty Development Committee and Co-Chair of the Maple League Teaching and Learning Committee. She is a recent (2024) recipient of the 3M National Teaching Fellowship, which recognizes the trifecta of teaching excellence, teaching innovation, and educational leadership.

Dr. Heather Lawford is a Canada Research Chair in Youth Development, Director and founding faculty of the Knowledge Mobilization Graduate Certificate, and a professor in the Psychology Department at Bishop’s University. She also serves as Co-Director of Research at the Centre for Excellence in Youth Engagement at the Students Commission of Canada. In 2024 she was also named a 3M National Teaching Fellow in recognition of her educational leadership. Her research focuses on early generativity, that is, how young people are motivated to care for future generations. Further, her knowledge mobilization work focuses on how youth-serving organizations can create space for young people to engage with and shape their legacies of lasting and meaningful change.

Dr. Angie Kolen is a Professor in Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University. Angie’s passion for teaching is obvious in her highly interactive classes and when she engages with her students in service learning promoting physical activity to children and toddlers in the programs she created, Fit 4 Life and Fit 4 Tots. She was awarded StFX’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006, the Atlantic Association of Universities Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008 and the 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 2010.

Dr. Jessica Riddell is the founder of Hope Circuits Institute, a think tank dedicated to systems re-wiring and renewal in the post-secondary sector. She is a Full Professor of Early Modern Literature in the English Department at Bishop’s University (Quebec, Canada). She holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence at Bishop’s University; in this capacity, she leads conversations about systems-change in higher education that shifts the focus from resilience to human flourishing. In her research, teaching, leadership, and administration, she participates in a wide range of interchanges at the national and international levels about how universities fulfil the social contract to a broader society.