Congratulations to Dr. Jan Hare, Associate Professor, Language and Literacy Education and Professor of Indigenous Education in Teacher Education, for receiving the Murray Elliott Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Teacher Education Program. She was honoured last evening at the Annual Faculty of Education Awards Event.
Dr. Jan Hare’s contributions to teacher education have been too numerous to list and too profound to summarize, but this brief overview gives some sense of her influence: for over a decade, she has been actively involved in developing, revising, and teaching courses in the Indigenous Teacher Education Program (NITEP). The course EDUC 440 – Aboriginal Education in Canada – was designed by Jan to introduce students to Indigenous ways of knowing and approaches to learning and is taken by every teacher candidate at UBC. To augment and extend that course, Jan developed a Teaching for Indigenous Education website as an online resource available to teacher candidates, teachers, and communities everywhere. Her online influence has been much expanded by her design and delivery of a Massive Open Online Course titled Reconciliation through Indigenous Education, which in two offerings has attracted almost 10,000 students and has the best retention rate of any of UBC’s MOOCs.
In the last couple of years alone, Jan has organized workshops, symposia, and professional development events for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators on such topics as residential schools, First Peoples Learning Principles, Indigenous knowledge and values, mentoring, linking the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to classroom practice, and bringing Elders into the classroom. In recognition of her extraordinary impact, Jan was named Professor of Indigenous Education in Teacher Education, and the Murray Elliott Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Teacher Education Program is a further tribute to her profound and lasting influence on teacher education at UBC and beyond.
