UBC Reports | Vol. 47 | No. 18 | November 15, 2001

Award affirms teaching matters, says Gass

Professor dreams of building true learning communities

Does this award have any special significance for you?

The most significant aspect is that the award acknowledges that teaching matters.

After decades of second-class citizenship for valuing my teaching as highly as research, it is wonderful to know that teaching can, in fact, matter greatly. In addition, my involvement in faculty development over the last decade has made me aware that many others also value teaching highly, and I know that an award like this can help to bring them the support and acknowledgment that they need and deserve.

In that sense, the award is as much a reminder to all of us that teaching matters as it is an acknowledgment of my own accomplishments.

What are your thoughts concerning UBC's undergraduate learning environment?

We have achieved a lot at UBC and elsewhere to make undergraduate education more vibrant, engaging, and effective than before, but we still have a long way to go.

Our most dramatic achievements have been to develop strong interdisciplinary programs in several faculties, but these reach relatively small numbers of students. An enormous challenge will be to apply the insights we've gained in those programs to larger numbers of students.

What do you hope the future holds for you as an educator?

I hope to spend the rest of my career sharing insights we've gained about building true learning communities at the undergraduate level with others at UBC and elsewhere.

Three challenges are particularly important.

How can we ensure interactive engagement among students about problems that they experience as real and important? This kind of teamwork is the most important pedagogical factor in achieving conceptual understanding by students of Science, and I suspect that it is similarly important in other disciplines.

How can faculties and other high-level units within universities develop effective interdisciplinary approaches to the content of courses, and how can they support and co-ordinate those efforts? This is a big question, and it implies kinds and degrees of co-operation and collaboration that are anything but traditional.

How can interdisciplinary teams of faculty work together in the classroom to achieve both of the above objectives?

Again, this extremely effective approach flies in the face of academic tradition.

We know how to make it work, but those lessons were hard-won and are worth sharing.

See also

Zoologist Canada's professor of the year