The CASCA Awards for Teaching Excellence (CATE) have been established to recognize the contributions to excellence in teaching and student learning in anthropology.  Two awards will be made every year at our annual conference. The first award is for instructors who teach on a “per course” basis, or who hold a limited-term faculty position that extends over no more than two years. The second award is for those holding permanent faculty positions (such as term-limited appointments longer than two years, tenure-track appointments, or tenured positions).

Eligibility:

1. CATE – Course Instructors 

Nominees must teach at a Canadian university or college, hold a PhD, be members of CASCA, and have taught as the primary instructor in at least four anthropology-focused courses over the past five years. This award is for those who teach on a “per course” basis, or who hold a limited-term faculty position that extends over no more than two years.

2. CATE – Permanent Faculty 

Nominees must teach at a Canadian university or college, hold a PhD, be members of CASCA, and have taught as the primary instructor in at least four anthropology-focused courses over the past five years. This award is for those who hold a permanent faculty position (such as term-limited appointments longer than two years, tenure-track appointments, or tenured positions.

Each administrative unit (eg. Department) may submit only one nomination for each award per year. Units should determine a process by which nominees are selected and advanced to CASCA’s CATE Committee.

Award recipients may not receive the award more than once.

Please download the CATE application form here.

CASCA is delighted to announce the 2022 recipients of the CASCA Awards for Teaching Excellence. Congratulations!

CATE - Instructor

Dr. Megan Graham has been a contract instructor in Anthropology at Carleton University since 2018, a year before she received her PhD in Anthropology at Carleton. She has taught a range of undergraduate courses, mostly in the field of Medical Anthropology, some of which have been cross-listed with graduate courses in Anthropology and Health Sciences. Drawing on her extensive research on ageing and the biopolitics of care in the context of technology and the creative arts, Megan provides student-centred and innovative teaching. She ensures that her courses and pedagogical approaches resonate fully and affectively with her students, aiming for them to learn about and integrate anthropological knowledge into their personal and professional lives. As a phenomenologist, she ensures her classes provide sensory experiences as a way to meet her learning objectives, even when she has been teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her pedagogical efforts and passion for anthropology have inspired many students in her courses.

CATE- Faculty

Dr. Mélissa Gauthier is Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches two core courses of the Anthropology undergraduate program (Sociocultural Anthropology and Introduction to Anthropological Research), in addition to special topics courses in Anthropology including Introduction to Anthropological Research, Economic Underworlds and Globalization, and Anthropology of Mexico. Mélissa’s teaching approach is characterized by a commitment to excellence, critical, transformative, engaged and experiential pedagogy. She fosters active learning in creating innovative and community-engaged opportunities for students. Her classrooms are spaces where equity and intellectual integrity are created and maintained and they are deemed ‘safe spaces’ for the engagement of difficult or challenging knowledge. Mélissa demonstrated at various occasions her consistent efforts to appeal to diverse student learning needs and provide opportunities to practice/develop useful skills.

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CASCA is delighted to announce the inaugural recipients of the CASCA Awards for Teaching Excellence (2021). Congratulations!

CATE - Instructor

Dr. Amirpouyan Shiva (Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Minnesota) is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia where he has been teaching a variety of undergraduate courses including Medical Anthropology and Anthropology of Media. His research looks at how technologies limit, enable, and program their users. His dissertation, based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Persian blogosphere, examines how the medium of blogging contributes to the creation of blogger’s identities and how, in turn, the selves fashioned in interaction with and communication through digital media affect social and political transformation. In the classroom, Dr. Shiva uses creative assignments drawing on contemporary issues and popular culture to inspire his students. 

CATE - Faculty

Dr. Louise de la Gorgendière is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Carleton University (since 2001) and Commonwealth Scholar (PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University). Previously, at the University of Edinburgh, she held a dual academic-consultancy post, and worked with DFID (UK), UNDP/ILO, French Government throughout Africa and Brazil. Louise’s teaching and research focus on education, development, HIV/AIDS and women’s rights, ethnopolitics, Ghana and the Ghanaian diaspora in Canada/UK, and immigration. Passionate about teaching and facilitating students’ deep learning, Louise draws upon her wealth of knowledge and applied experiences and uses problem-based and participatory pedagogical approaches in her teaching.