Mount Allison professor awarded 3M National Teaching Fellowship
2013-02-13 09:27:11
SACKVILLE, NB — Mount Allison geography and environment professor and department head Dr. Colin Laroque has been awarded a prestigious 3M National Teaching Fellowship. The award is widely recognized as Canada’s top teaching award.
Mount Allison University President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Robert Campbell says, “We are so pleased to hear the news of another 3M National Teaching Fellow at Mount Allison University. Colin’s commitment to his students’ teaching and research is evident in their success and enthusiasm in his courses and beyond. I wish to congratulate him on this well-deserved award.”
Laroque teaches classes in introductory geography, weather and climate, and geomorphology. He also teaches an intensive field course — which saw students travelling to Jasper, AB the past two years for research. He oversees the Mount Allison Dendrochronology (MAD) Lab, the only lab of its kind in Atlantic Canada. Dendrochronology is the study of tree rings and can shed light on historical records of climate change and weather patterns as well as past forest ecology.
“I try to take my classes into the environment we’re learning about — we go outside as much as possible,” says Laroque, who also is a past recipient of Mount Allison’s Tucker Teaching Award and the Association of the Atlantic Universities Distinguished Teaching Award. “If you’re learning about something like how to measure wind chill, you’re going to remember and understand it a lot more if you’ve actually experienced it. These are powerful learning moments that I try to take advantage of.”
Laroque believes in giving his students input into their own learning. “The first assignment in my field course is to answer the question, ‘What would you like to learn in this class?’ This is usually the hardest assignment for them, but the best one. It puts them in the drivers seat for some of the curriculum and we learn together. Last fall in an introductory course, the class selected Arctic sea ice for the topic of an additional lecture, I learned a lot from that class too.”
Laroque, along with his students, has been a guest speaker for elementary, middle, and high school classes and community groups. They have also made regional and national media headlines for their research in the MAD Lab, communicating the importance of dendrochronology and the insights it can provide into climate change and weather patterns in an accessible way.
As the 3M Selection Committee notes, “Colin Laroque’s work as an educator is perfectly encapsulated by the 3M Ethos.”
Laroque is the sixth Mount Allison professor to receive this national award, giving the University one of the best records in the Maritimes. Previous Mount Allison 3M Teaching Fellows include: Elizabeth Wells, Music; Robert Lapp, English; Robert Summerby-Murray, geography and environment; Bob Hawkes, physics and astronomy; and Alex Fancy; modern languages and drama.
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