Burton Wins Award
In a ceremony just before the holidays, Dr. Valerie Burton was named the 2017 recipient of the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award. This is the Memorial’s most prestigious award for teaching, recognizing pedagogic excellence in both undergraduate and graduate teaching in and beyond a particular discipline. This crowning achievement follows upon earlier recognition by MUNSU, both for excellence in teaching and for her outstanding contribution to campus life, and by the Dean of Arts’ Award for Teaching.
Dr Burton has been at the forefront of developing online resources in maritime history. Her Titanic course was signaled out by McLean’s magazine as one of the country’s most engaging, while her “More than a list of crew” web site is an exceptional resource for anyone interested in using the remarkable holdings of the Maritime History Archive.
Helping students grabble with historical sources is central to her pedagogy and she has published path-breaking research on how different this is online in contrast to a normal classroom setting.
Dr. Burton was the founding academic director of First Year Success here at Memorial, where she developed innovative courses to help students who had not fared well in high school to integrate into the university community.
The award comes with a $5,000 grant and she is using the funds to finance a symposium, January 19, on student work in the archives. Quite appropriately, she will be using the remainder of the grant to herself become a student, in master shipwright Jerome Canning’s course, where the class will be building a Newfoundland punt over the winter.
https://www.mun.ca/honours/teaching/excellence/President.php