During the Spring 2024 Arts ‘B’ ceremony, Debra Thompson, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies, was awarded the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Excellence in Teaching.
“I’m so grateful and honored to receive the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching” says Professor Thompson. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve always found teaching to be the most challenging, humbling, rewarding, and important part of this job.”
Lisa Shapiro, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, presented Professor Thompson with her award and praised Thompsons’s classrooms as “dynamic spaces, brimming with energy from both sides of the podium.”
“Her students are eager, engaged, and comfortable discussing the difficult and challenging subject matter her courses address, which includes structural racism, systems of domination and oppression, police violence, and the difficulty of social change,” reads the citation.
“To have the difficult and fraught subject matter that I teach resonate with so many students, who come to class prepared and engaged, who show up week after week and do the work, even when that work is soul-destroying, who know that this is the price of learning to see the world differently … that is really something special,” says Professor Thompson. “But then again, everyone knows the best thing about 鶹AV is the students.”
Read the full citation here:
Debra Thompson’s classrooms are dynamic spaces, brimming with energy from both sides of the podium. Her students are eager, engaged, and comfortable discussing the difficult and challenging subject matter her courses address, which includes structural racism, systems of domination and oppression, police violence, and the difficulty of social change. And her ability to shift teaching styles in one 80-minute lecture is unparalleled. That there is something new going on every 15-20 minutes – from a brief video, to a data-rich Power Point presentation, to group brainstorming sessions, to a concluding discussion – reveals her innate ability to captivate and engage her students. Her syllabi are also beautifully crafted: The topics build on one another, cover an extraordinary amount of material, and incorporate students’ intense interest in current events and headlines while offering them a window into the study of the history and social science of race and racism, exclusion, and democracy. It is therefore no surprise that her two core 300 level classes on race and democracy are consistently oversubscribed. And it is no surprise that her students consistently rate her 5 out of 5. Debra Thompson creates an atmosphere that allows her students to thrive. As one student wrote: “Professor Thompson has truly changed my life. Her classes made me feel heard as she managed to put words to things that I have repeatedly experienced as a racialised person. I now feel more connected to my identity and race and take more pride in it.”