Secondary Education professor Dr. Olenka Bilash has announced that this fall she will begin journeying towards a phased retirement. She will continue working with her current doctoral students and conducting research with an official retirement date set for August 2024.

An eternally curious scholar whose cup is – as she puts it – always more than half full, Bilash is praised by her colleagues as a positive force that has helped internationalize the university through her roles as an educator, a researcher and a diplomat.

Exams are a common source of stress for students, but little has been done to explore ways for educators to alleviate this stress. Now, a researcher in the Faculty of Education is embarking on a project that will put student well-being at the forefront of assessment practices.

Educational psychology professor Lia Daniels was recently awarded more than $277,000 from the SSHRC Insight Grant program to fund a five-year project entitled "Reorienting assessment practices in higher education: prioritizing student well-being through motivation theory.”

A made-in-Alberta program to help young students who are struggling with reading has been exported to Belize with the help of two University of Alberta doctoral students in educational psychology. Dalia Carolina Martinez Cano and Sandra Romero, both international students from Mexico, visited Belize in August as part of an initiative aimed at training teachers to support children in recovering from significant learning loss caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

A passionate educator whose award-winning research into improving language and literacy learning for culturally diverse students was rooted in her experiences teaching in First Nations schools, Dr. Lynne Wiltse retired from the Faculty of Education on June 30. Wiltse completed her MEd (1995) and PhD (2004) at the U of A and taught at Thompson Rivers University before joining the Faculty as associate professor in 2009. She was promoted to full professor in 2020.

Carla Singer describes her journey through the Urban Secondary Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (ATEP) over the last four years as being like a flower blooming.

“First it’s all crumpled up and then one petal at a time comes out,” she says. “Finally it starts to bloom and then, there’s your world. I did this — after all the struggles, I did it.”

When Teacher Education North (TEN) BEd student Lindsay Halcrow learned that she was selected as her graduating class’s salutatorian, she was thrilled.

“I am very thankful to have been selected for such a prestigious honour and I am over the moon,” Halcrow says.

In addition to delivering a speech to her classmates at their upcoming convocation ceremony, she will also receive a $1,500 financial reward.

University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) alumni Lorisia MacLeod and Kayla Lar-Son are proving to be influential leaders in the library community.

Lanie Luarca brought with her a dozen years of teaching experience in her native Philippines and in Dubai, UAE, when she relocated with her family to Canada in 2016. An assessment by Alberta Education showed significant upgrading would be required for her to become licensed to teach in the province so she settled into working in a daycare centre. She says she liked the job, but her desire to return to teaching persisted.

The coronavirus pandemic prompted a widespread shift to online learning that left educators without much chance to prepare for the new mode of delivering their courses. Two years later, some are still struggling to make their virtual teaching as meaningful and effective as in-person instruction.

Among the challenges presented by remote learning is the need to accurately assess each students’ progress and provide timely, constructive feedback that helps them identify their strengths and address their weaknesses—a challenge that’s compounded in higher education settings by large class sizes and complex concepts that call on higher order thinking skills.