AWARD RECIPIENTS

Nancy Southern is a southern Albertan through and through. She was born and raised in Calgary, studied economics at the University of Calgary and has established a career that has seen her serve with some of the world’s most influential organizations. She is the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of ATCO Ltd., which was founded by her father, R.D. Southern, in 1947, and Canadian Utilities Limited, an ATCO company. In this position, she is responsible for executing the strategic direction and ongoing operations for both companies and, under her deft leadership, the ATCO group of companies has seen extraordinary growth and demonstrated an enduring commitment to the communities and customers it serves.

Philanthropy and community spirit are core values for Southern. Alongside her business leadership, she has advocated on matters of global importance, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the role of women in business. She is an Honorary Chief of the Kainai (Blood Tribe of Alberta) and was given the name Aksistoowa’paakii, or Brave Woman, in 2012. In 2015, at the request of then-German chancellor Angela Merkel, Southern joined 100 other global leaders for the G7 Forum for Dialogue with Women. As a passionate believer in enterprise as a powerful force for good, she has advised domestic and international governments alike. She honours her family and supports her community, embracing her father’s definition of excellence — ‘going far beyond the call of duty, doing more than others expect.’

Southern joined the ATCO board of directors in 1989, was named CEO in 2003, and appointed Chair in 2012. In addition, Southern serves on the boards of all ATCO subsidiaries. She is a founding director of AKITA Drilling, executive vice-president of Spruce Meadows, a director of Sentgraf Enterprises Ltd., an Honorary Director of BMO Financial Group and serves on the Rideau Hall Foundation Board of Directors.

The accolades Southern has earned during her career are numerous. In 2012, she received the Peter Lougheed Award for Leadership from Canada’s Public Policy Forum. In 2013, she received the T. Patrick Boyle Founder’s Award for Entrepreneurship from the Fraser Institute. She was named to Fortune Magazine’s list of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2016 and inducted as a Companion to the Canadian Business Hall of Fame in 2017. In October 2020, Southern was honoured with the British Empire Medal for services to British equestrian, military and commercial interests in Alberta.

BOARD OF GOVERNORS TEACHING CHAIR

As a professor of new media, Leanne Elias not only inspires students to think creatively in her graphic design courses, she also approaches her teaching creatively, always finding ways to challenge students and complement their knowledge. She encourages them to explore and experiment with new media tools while focusing on relevant ideas. Her passion for teaching has earned her numerous awards in the past and this year, she is the recipient of the Board of Governors Teaching Chair.

Elias ensures her students have opportunities to maximize their learning through extracurricular activities related to the profession. Twice she has led student fundraising activities to enable attendance at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. Focused on emerging creative technologies, the festival draws the best creative minds in the world.

In addition, she has co-facilitated several interdisciplinary workshops for the Faculty of Fine Arts and was instrumental in bringing a series of award-winning animations to Lethbridge. Elias has also been a champion for the importance of teaching development in the University community. In 20122013, she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the University’s Advancement for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Elias has become a facilitator for the Instructional Skills Workshop, a course designed to enhance teaching effectiveness for both new and experienced educators.

As Board of Governors Teaching Chair, Elias plans to develop and deliver a series of interdisciplinary workshops for both undergraduate and graduate students with the goal of understanding how teaching changes when working with multiple disciplines and how students are impacted. She also intends to bring together a community of practice for interdisciplinary teaching.

The idea for her project came about after she, along with colleagues Dana Cooley and Denton Fredrickson, held an Intersections workshop in 2013 that brought students from art, new media, education and computer science together to work on the same challenge. Students found enormous value in combining the various approaches to problem solving from different disciplines.

Following the workshop, the Fine Arts Visualization/Physicalization Lab was established. Since then, a course involving new media students and an agricultural researcher has been offered annually and a two-year project between six professional artists and two agricultural researchers called Visualizing Agriculture was launched.

Not only will Elias impact student learning through this project, she’ll also provide ideas for faculty members to integrate interdisciplinary work into their own curriculum.

EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AWARD

Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick doesn’t mind seeing his students fail. In fact, he encourages his students to take chances and push beyond their comfort zones, accepting that mistakes will happen — and that’s where the true learning begins.

An instructor in ULethbridge’s Department of Mathematics & Computer Science since 2014, Fitzpatrick is renowned for understanding the student perspective and tailoring his teaching to minimize student anxiety and elevate understanding. He does this by challenging longheld standards of assessment and emphasizing flexibility and availability, both for himself and course materials. At the core of his teaching philosophy is that mathematics is learned through trying, failing and then learning from mistakes. He trusts his students want to learn, and whenever possible, will allow students to revise and reassess their work for credit — even on tests. The approach reinforces a class dynamic where he and his students learn and advance collectively.

Fitzpatrick is keenly aware of the student experience and has long been a champion of equity in education. Recognizing the cost of textbooks can be a prohibitive barrier for many students, he developed his own website, where he hosts or links to textbooks for 17 courses in mathematics and statistics. Some are available in HTML, which works on any device, have embedded videos, interactive graphics and homework exercises, and even code cells that let students execute live computer code to help with calculations. In addition, Fitzpatrick maintains a free online homework portal for all his classes — something which has been adopted by instructors throughout the department. When classes were moved online due to the pandemic, Fitzpatrick was instrumental in recognizing that requiring students to turn their cameras on in class could publicly expose living environments and/ or financial situations students had the right to keep private.

Accessibility is another hallmark of his teaching. Utilizing the Teaching Centre while a Teaching Fellow from 2018 to 2020, Fitzpatrick took advantage of the lightboard resource to create hundreds of professional-quality instructional videos and develop his own YouTube channel. Many new students struggle to make effective use of their textbooks, and by augmenting the books with video explanations, students digest ideas they are not used to seeing in print. Fitzpatrick continually seeks to enhance his own skills and that of the teaching community and has taken on a leadership role in promoting open education resources — with his own resources publicly available and used by mathematics students and teachers worldwide.