This prestigious award recognizes University of Manitoba educators who have demonstrated continuing teaching excellence and made significant contributions to advancing teaching and learning at UM.

Jennifer Watt

Professor, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education

Students and colleagues alike commend Jennifer Watt for her passion, empathy and creativity, which are having a transformative impact in the field of education.

Watt is deeply committed to advancing equity and social justice in education. Since joining the University of Manitoba in a faculty position in 2017, her teaching has inspired learners at all stages – from first-year undergraduates to experienced educators – to view teaching as a pathway to building a more compassionate and inclusive world.

She played a pivotal role in developing Introduction to Education: What It Means to Teach, a course grounded in the themes of Belonging, Meaning, Purpose, and Hope (outlined in “Mamàhtawisiwin”, a 2022 Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning Indigenous education policy document) and the four guiding questions taught by the late Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair. Due to its popularity, the course has expanded from three to five sections, drawing hundreds of undergraduate students. One student reflected, “Her class has taught me so much about the education system and gave me insight into whether teaching was the career for me. I have never felt so welcomed, cared for and appreciated in a classroom.”

Watt’s innovative approaches include thoughtfully designed teaching strategies and assessments that respect student autonomy, honour diversity, and encourage reflection and growth. Her “Choose Your Own Adventure” assignment, for example, offers students multiple pathways to demonstrate their learning in ways that reflect their identities, experiences and aspirations.

She also co-leads the Manitoba Writing Project and co-teaches a Summer Writing Institute with her colleague, Michelle Honeyford. The 6-credit graduate/post-diploma course brings together educators, researchers and writers to explore the transformative power of writing and place-based inquiry. Each year, this unique program is situated in a new context, from King’s Park to public murals and monuments across Manitoba.

Beyond the classroom, Watt shares her expertise widely through a variety of platforms – webinars, podcasts, creative multimedia tools and experiential learning activities, making knowledge accessible and impactful. Her passion for teaching is contagious, and her pedagogy – rooted in care, accountability and community – is shaping the next generation of compassionate, justice-oriented educators.

Wan Wang

Instructor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts

Wan Wang is a dedicated and passionate educator whose teaching has had a profound impact on undergraduate psychology students, particularly in the areas of research methods and assessment.

Wang teaches multiple sessions of three research courses that form the foundation for most programs within the Department of Psychology. Her student-centred approach makes abstract and technically complex research concepts both understandable and engaging. By grounding her pedagogy in self-determination theory, she fosters student motivation and well-being by addressing key needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Her teaching strategies combine rigor with relevance, helping students build competency in critical thinking and problem-solving skills, leading to high engagement. In a glowing review from one student, they noted how Wang put them at ease despite the challenging material: “Dr. Wang is really good at explaining concepts that normally would be daunting and stressful.” She integrates current and relatable content – such as the ethical use of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT – and develops experiential learning projects that allow students to pursue topics aligned with their own interests. She also demonstrates how their own research activities can contribute to ongoing efforts of reducing barriers to access building a more just society.

Wang is also deeply committed to her own professional growth and to advancing teaching and learning at UM. She regularly participates in teaching workshops both at the university and through external organizations and has received funding for research projects that enhance student learning, supported by the Provost’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Support Fund and the Faculty of Arts’ Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund. A strong advocate for knowledge mobilization, she actively shares her research findings and teaching practices with colleagues. Since joining UM in 2019, she has received multiple teaching awards from both university administrative units and student-led organizations.

Through her exemplary dedication and innovative use of psychological principles in teaching, Wang has positively impacted thousands of undergraduate students in the Department of Psychology.

The University of Manitoba proudly congratulates Jennifer Watt and Wan Wang on this well-deserved recognition of their excellence in teaching.

“Congratulations to these researchers who are probing new directions in social sciences and humanities research,” said Mario Pinto, vice-president (research & international). “The success of these projects speaks highly of the quality of emerging fundamental research at UM.”

UM 2024 Insight Development Grant recipients include:

Namita Bhatnagar, Professor & F. Ross Johnson Fellow, Marketing Department

Sensitive women and rational men: Bridging the gender divide in consumer and employee green behaviours

This project seeks to facilitate greater participation of both men and women in pro-environmentalism by identifying de-stigmatizing strategies in the current discourse. Men may worry about a “green-feminine” or “caring women” stereotype, while women may be hindered by heightened anxiety in male-dominated domains associated with a “tech-savvy men” stereotype. Bhatnagar proposes a multi-phase consumer and organizational exploration of the interplay between varied gender stereotypes and environmental sustainability in contexts that are traditionally homemaking adjacent and those that are affiliated with the contemporary green tech movement.

David Drewes, Associate Professor, Department of Religion

Early Scholarship on Buddhism

Focused on the beginnings of scholarship on Buddhism in the first half of the nineteenth century, Drewes seeks to examine two lesser known but significant sources of ideas and influence. This includes early publications of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the work of Horace Hayman Wilson, the first Boden professor of Sanskrit at Oxford.

Amy Farrell, Assistant Professor, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Ikwe and Amik: Indigenous storying and feminine being within and beyond the Fur Trade, an educational inquiry

Farrell seeks to address the urgent need for Indigenous women’s voices in the history of the fur trade, which have been largely excluded from literature and records. This research employs an innovative Indigenous storying methodology to intricately blend culturally significant Indigenous knowledge and worldview. Using creative fiction to portray collective experiences, the enduring value of women’s roles can be emphasized.

Jennifer Watt, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education

We Interrupt this Programming: Confronting Gender Based Sexual Violence through Critical Media Literacies in K-12 Schools

With this project, Watt and co-investigator Shannon Moore aims to confront barriers to teaching about consent, gender-based sexual violence and support survivors in K-12 schools using popular media as a catalyst for change. This research is urgently needed by educators and school systems to understand how critical media literacies can be harnessed to confront and disrupt the many ways that gender-based sexual violence exists in society. Learn more on the We Interrupt this Programming webpage.

Bruno De Oliveira Jayme, Assistant Professor, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Social Movement Learning – An Exploration of Quality Education Through Participatory Video

De Olivera Jayme seeks to address the gaps between formal and informal education with actionable steps for more equitable and participatory learning practices. What and how Canadian school system can learn from educational grassroots movements from South America? Working with the vibrant Slum Defense Movement from São Paulo, Brazil, this study uses arts-based participatory action research to identify insights that can inform formal education in North America.

Muhammad Kabir, Assistant Professor, Accounting & Finance Department

Auditor Liability, Firm-level Audit Quality, and Investment: The Effect of the Livent Case on Canadian Firms

This project will test how changes in auditors’ litigation risk affect audit quality and investments in Canada, providing empirical evidence supporting the work of regulators. Kabir will mobilize this evidence to inform how increased liability may positively or adversely affect audit quality and demonstrate how firms respond to their investment decisions as their auditors’ liability changes. Read Muhammad Kabir’s most recent publication on ScienceDirect.

Jody Stark, Associate Professor, Desautels Faculty of Music

Developing and Piloting a Local Music Pedagogy

This collaborative research project engages local music educators along with representatives of various community arts organizations to create a decolonizing framework for music education in Treaty 1 territory. The results of this innovative project will allow the Stark research team to pilot a locally-informed music pedagogy and provide guidance to educators, policy makers and community arts organizations for community-school collaborations as a way to decolonize and Indigenize music education. Read Jody Stark’s publications on Academia.

Jie Yang, Assistant Professor, Business Administration Department

My Turf, My Rules: Investigating the Roles of Customers in Product Categorization

This project will offer a more holistic understanding of product categorization by investigating the roles of individual customers in the categorization process. Product categorization involves assigning one or more category labels to a product. Existing literature has predominantly focused on how producers, for the purposes of capturing monetary value, dominate the categorization of their products. Yang seeks to address the imbalance in category literature by reframing the relationship between product categories and economic outcomes within a customer-centered framework. Read Jie Yang’s most recent publication on SageJournals.

Xiumei Li, Assistant Professor, Business Administration Department

Entrepreneurial Success in Crowdfunding: The Art and Science of Sensemaking

Li employs a mixed method approach to investigate how entrepreneurs develop effective referencing strategies to actively engage audiences and secure necessary resources with crowdfunded ventures. This study will examine popular crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, with a focus on entrepreneurs’ sensemaking around the relative nature of novelty and other key reference points.

“The success of these projects speaks highly of the quality of new and emerging research at UM,” said Mario Pinto, vice-president (research & international). “I congratulate these twelve researchers on seeking new and cutting-edge ways to address the challenges faced by society.”

The 2023 UM Insight Development Grant recipients are:

Margherita Cameranesi

Margherita Cameranesi, postdoctoral researcher/fellow, Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences: Finding Your Resilience (FYRe): Listening to the Voices of Racialized Refugee Youth to Learn About Their Multisystemic Resilience Using a Participatory Action Research Approach

By listening to the voices of racialized refugee youth who resettled in Winnipeg, Margherita Cameranesi seeks to better understand the mechanisms that contribute to their resilience, mental health, and overall wellbeing. She also aims to develop culturally appropriate and trauma-informed resources for racialized youth seeking asylum in Canada.

Sarah Ciurysek

Sarah Ciurysek, associate professor, School of Art: Navigating a land gift as a settler committed to decolonization: a photographic research/creation project

This year Ciurysek (a settler artist) will be gifted a section of land in northwestern Alberta. Being committed to decolonization and reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous Peoples, Ciurysek seeks to examine decolonizing land use options for privately-owned farmland through a photographic interrogation of self, history, and contemporary land use.

Benjamin Collins

Benjamin Collins, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology: Narratives from Fragments: Re-Thinking Narratives of Manitoba’s Archaeology

Indigenous researchers Kayla Shaganash and Brandi Cable, co-applicant Laura Kelvin, and Collins will study archaeological materials from six sites across Manitoba to help inform how Indigenous peoples engaged with landscapes across the past 8,000 years. This project will provide further training for Indigenous researchers and facilitate engagement with Indigenous communities.

Merissa Daborn

Merissa Daborn, assistant professor, Department of Indigenous Studies: The Food Police: Carceral Food Spaces in Winnipeg

In response to recent increased security and policing at grocery stores, Daborn seeks to better understand the impact of surveillance on Indigenous people in Winnipeg, especially as it relates to their ability to achieve food security. This research will document how systematic surveillance practices result in criminalization of racialized communities.

Zhenzhen Fan

Zhenzhen Fan, Assistant professor, Department of Accounting and Finance: Market Crash Risk: Fact or Artifact?

This project seeks to address whether the risk of financial crash is inherent in the market, or if they result from subjective perceptions of investors. By exploring probable triggers for market turmoil, Fan seeks to better inform investors and policy makers and reduce the risk of crash in the future.

Hikmet Gunay, professor, Department of Economics: Anticipated Regret in Second-Price Auctions

Some bidders go bankrupt after winning an auction due to overbidding. In this research, we aim to understand how emotions cause overbidding, and offer solutions to correct it. Governments can use this research when auctioning infrastructure projects which will prevent bankrupts so that the projects will be completed on time.

Gayle Halas

Gayle Halas, researcher, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences: Homeless, Recovering and ‘Back to the Street’: Identifying the Support Network

Partnering with community agencies and individuals with lived experience of homelessness, the Halas research team seeks to bridge the gap between availability and access to resources/supports needed by individuals experiencing homelessness and discharged from hospital. This project will identify challenges and inform ongoing efforts to launch a Support Hub to facilitate navigation.

Sreemali Herath

Sreemali Herath, assistant professor, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning: Towards inclusive and reciprocal pedagogical practices for all learners: Insights from refugee journeys

Set against unprecedented forced migration, this study aims to document narratives of the refugee journey to Canada. Focusing on refugee families, it aims to develop asset oriented, inclusive and reciprocal curricula that will benefits all learners and provide a broader and more nuanced understanding of refugeeism.

Stephanie Hladik

Stephanie Hladik, assistant professor, Centre for Engineering Professional Practice and Engineering Education: The Impact of Facilitating STEM Outreach: Perceptions, Identities, and Other Impacts

This project works in collaboration with WISE Kid-Netic Energy, a nonprofit STEM outreach organization that recruits undergraduate students from underrepresented groups as facilitators. Hladik seeks to investigate how planning and delivering STEM education impacts how these facilitators perceive STEM fields, develop STEM identities, and gain new skills and career interests.

Jeongmin Kim

Jeongmin Kim, assistant professor, Department of History: Unseemly Military: The Undocumented Workers of U.S. War and Military Occupation in Cold War Asia

This project will engage labor injustice in war and military occupation by offering historical perspectives on contemporary issues of gendered and racialized militarization of everyday life. To understand how local people respond to unfavorable employment in times of war, Kim will investigate cases from 1940s and 50s Cold War Asia.

Suzanne McLeod

Suzanne McLeod, assistant professor, School of Art: Early Distortion: Pinturicchio and the Genesis of a Constructed Image

Possibly the earliest depiction of North American Indigenous people in European art, a recently cleaned Vatican fresco reveals a destructive embryonic stereotype developing alongside Columbus’s 1493 voyage report and the “Doctrine of Discovery”. This project will close an art historical gap by reinterpreting the visual record through an Indigenous perspective.

Virginia Tze

Virginia Tze, associate professor, Educational Administration, Foundations and Psychology: Identifying Systemic Barriers Among People of Colour Entering in Professional Psychology

Canada is experiencing a mental health crisis, and People of Colour looking for a psychologist who is also a Person of Colour can expect to wait up to a decade.  This project seeks to understand how to better support People of Colour in becoming professional psychologists, through a mixed methods design.

This investment, through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), will fund research projects at the U of M that touch on many aspects of daily life, such as air pollution and mental health, airlines’ passenger data protection investment, Swampy Cree political theories, reading acquisition timelines, privacy in mobile applications, and more.

These projects will also promote collaboration and partnerships among academic researchers, businesses, and community partners to advance knowledge and understanding on these critical issues.

“Congratulations to all our scholars recognized today for their tireless work. I thank them for their dedication to improving our social systems,” says Digvir Jayas, vice-president (research and international) and Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba.

Twenty-nine U of M graduate students, including postdoctoral fellows, also received over a million dollars in support in today’s announcement.

“These graduate students will make an impact on our lives through their exemplary research that drives innovation and advancement into issues that matter to us all,” says professor Louise Simard, Acting Dean of Faculty of Graduate Studies, at the University of Manitoba. “I wish them well and continued success on their research journeys.”

The minister’s announcement today celebrated over $285 million in funding for over 3,600 projects across the country. She made the announcement in Fredericton, NB.

“We must not underestimate the value of the social sciences and humanities; these fields play a critical role in building a healthier, stronger and more prosperous Canada,” Duncan said. “I want to commend all of today’s grant recipients for contributing in meaningful ways to the evolution of research in this country.”

U of M recipients are:

A young girl, recently immigrated to Winnipeg, is trying to fit in at her new school. Quiet and observant, she keeps to the peripheries of rooms—and classmates. Then, at an after-school program, she is taught something so inspiring that she heads straight to the school office the next day. Can she start a club with the new skills she’s learned?

A space is booked, supplies are provided and on the first lunch hour that she hosts the club, there is a room full of eager students. What are they there to do?

Arm knitting.

Michelle Honeyford.

You won’t find it in the provincial curricula, but that’s exactly the point, says Michelle Honeyford, associate professor, department of curriculum, teaching and learning, Faculty of Education. She is also director of CanU, U of M’s after-school academic, sport and nutrition program for Grades 5 to 12 that inspired the arm knitting club.

Honeyford: ‘It’s about developing community.’

“I say to the students [who coordinate the program], ‘This is an opportunity to step outside the kinds of things you might be expected to teach. Design a program around your passions and interests where the relationships come first. It’s about developing community.’”

Musical theatre, escape rooms, robotics, archaeology, nutrition. Name the subject, and there is probably a CanU Academy teaching it.

Run by U of M student volunteers, many earning their B.Ed., CanU has grown from just three programs with 15 kids and 30 student volunteers to almost 50 programs with 500 kids from across 40 Winnipeg schools. They are joined by 500 U of M student volunteers from 30 different faculties and departments.

Sharing passion, learning self-reflection

For the middle school children in CanU, the six-week initiative opens up a world of ideas, possibilities and aspirations. For the university students, the outreach experience is unlike anything else in their studies.

“During their practicum, [students] focus on doing well in the curriculum and developing teaching strategies,” explains Honeyford.

Participants at the 2018 CanU Family Celebration.

“We’ve deliberately made CanU a space where they can try something new. When we share our passions with others, a different kind of relationship is developed.”

Through that relationship, and a high teacher-to-student ratio, another skill emerges: being a reflective practitioner. At the end of each CanU session, the B.Ed. students engage in peer-to-peer mentoring.

They talk about what went well, what was unexpected and what their response could be next time.

“Maybe one of the students was really quiet and sitting off by themselves,” says Honeyford. “They start talking about what could be prompting that and then they make a plan together. To see how their peers interact with students gives them another set of approaches, repertoire and ways of thinking. That collaboration is so important to developing effective teachers, and it’s an opportunity they don’t get a lot of.”

Mentorship comes full circle

Professor Joannie Halas starts her Diverse Populations Mentorship course by showing her new crop of students a photo of kids who participated in U of M’s Rec and Read program. The program is another way the U of M is extending mentoring into the wider community.

A young woman recognized herself  in one of the photos.  “She was a high school mentor [in the program] at Garden Hill First Nation and now she’s in Winnipeg coming into University 1,” says Halas. “That was beautiful.”

It’s the full-circle, ‘cradle to career’ result the professor in the bachelor of physical education program in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management has been striving for over the past 20 years.

Rec and Read began in 2002 as a way to attract more Indigenous students into careers in physical education. It also helps current university students become more effective teachers by experiencing a diverse curriculum.

University and community mentors At the Rec and Read “Culture Camp.”

Halas: ‘With Rec and Read, Indigenous values inform everything we do.’

“With Rec and Read, Indigenous values inform everything we do,” explains Halas. “A lot of mentoring programs are based on a Western model where a more experienced, older, mature, mentor works with a mentee. We see mentorship as reciprocity. Learning is happening both ways.”

The university students collaborate with high school students to plan a customized after-school program centred on physical activity, nutrition and literacy. Together, they deliver the weekly program to early years students from Indigenous and diverse communities around Manitoba.

“Some university students have to unlearn what they’re taught in some of their courses because in Rec and Read, you’re there to facilitate the leadership and the gifts of the high school students. You have to find a way to be a good mentor, to bring out the best in the young people you’re working with.”

As the high school students learn organization, communication and group management skills, their confidence builds. They can see themselves as leaders in their communities, or going further with their education—like the Garden-Hill-mentor-turned-U-of-M student did.

Building relationships through outreach is invaluable to the university mentors, too. Many choose to become educators up North or in the inner city, working with Indigenous and newcomer youth. Halas considers that the biggest contribution of Rec and Read.

“Our strongest pedagogy, if we look at the most successful practices, is relational and experiential,” says Halas.

Should more mentorship be integrated with teaching? Yes, says Halas. “It just makes a lot of sense.”

This story first appeared in the special mentoring issue of TeachingLIFE published in Fall 2018; read the rest of the issue online.