Our award-winning teachers

Associate Professor Ann Black

School of Law / Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

Society and Culture

A/Prof Ann Black teaches two popular electives for final-year Law students: LAWS5167 Asian Legal Systems and LAWS5189 Islamic law. In 2000, realising that students had only understanding of common law, Ann began her journey as a pioneer in Islamic law teaching and an advocate for Asian legal literacy. Committed to equipping her students to be informed global citizens who could evaluate other approaches to law, and informed by her research on Shari’a and Asia, Ann designed two innovative courses to counter ethnocentric understandings of law. Aware that traditional law teaching and assessment would not help students ‘get their heads around’ different legal paradigms, Ann’s distinctive learning and assessment design supports her students to think – and do – differently, giving them confidence to make sense of law. From the outset, she disseminated her comparative teaching philosophy and practice via numerous articles, books, conference and keynote presentations, and invited professorships at six overseas universities. As a nationally and internationally recognised field leader, Ann has represented Australia at Asian and Sharia legal education forums. She is the recipient of eleven UQ Law School teaching awards, including a 2022 Law Award for Teaching Excellence in recognition of her Sustained excellence in legal education.

Dr Suja Pillai

School of Biomedical Sciences / Faculty of Medicine

Health

Development of critical thinking is an essential skill needed for medical students, it prepares them for practice and lifelong learning, a proficiency needed for every practicing health professional. As a pathology lead and coordinator for the Phase 1 Doctor of Medicine (MD) program, Dr Suja Pillai has been a facilitator of this process for UQ over the last four years. Suja led innovative teaching approaches in pathology which include museum integrated pathology curriculum, multidisciplinary learning models, and student-centered virtual classrooms. Suja's teaching and learning approaches enabled learners to associate theoretical information with their own frame of reference and better connect with real-world situations a much-needed skill for future doctors. Suja’s student-centered approaches in pathology teaching and learning have helped students engage in 'deep' learning to support academic success and self-confidence aligning with the UQ student strategy of training game-changing graduates and enhancing their employability. Suja’s passion for student-centered learning pedagogy has been recognised through multiple teaching awards including the prestigious John Pearn Medallion and Higher Education Academy Fellowship. 

Dr Peter Walters

School of Social Science / Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Society and Culture

Sociologists are trained to understand the complexity, ambiguity and power relations that constitute our social world and affect the life chances of people and groups. Dr Peter Walters has built an outstanding record of achievement in teaching and mentoring at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. He trains students to think beyond their own experience to see the world around them for its possibilities, challenges and inequities. He does this by instilling the skills, imagination and empathy required for students to see beyond the surface and become critical interpreters of the local, national and global communities in which they live and work. Peter’s methodology is to train students to first interpret their own social worlds. Using his considerable experience living and working in different cultural contexts he then provides students with rich insights, case studies and trajectories, giving them the methodological tools to interpret and understand the lives of the ‘unfamiliar’. Peter’s guiding aim is to produce empathetic leaders and good citizens. His teaching has been recognised by students and peers for its ground-breaking assessment methods including incremental critical reflection, documentary video making and sociological interpretation of popular media. Peter’s teaching was recognised with a HASS Teaching Excellence Award in 2021.

Dr Ryan Williams

School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Early Career

Since joining UQ in 2018 as lecturer in Studies in Religion, Dr Ryan Williams has redeveloped and led courses on World Religions & Spiritualities, Islam, and Religion, Peace & Violence, while teaching into three other courses integral to the BA and Honours’ programs and advising six PhD students. Ryan’s teaching and research interests focus on diversity and inclusion in multicultural societies, and he embraces the challenge of teaching students to live and work in complex and diverse modern societies. Ryan fosters curiosity and constructive critique, cultivating opportunities for empathetic encounters with religious and cultural diversity. He uses innovative place-based and experiential learning approaches – in prisons, in places of worship, and in public spaces and using immersive multimedia technologies including 360 degree panoramas developed in collaboration with local faith communities. His teaching methods foster student curiosity to enable critical and open-minded engagement with “hot topic” issues and to foster positive relationships. He co-constructs knowledge with his students and researches learning outcomes with them. Connecting research, teaching, and engagement, underpinned by his ARC-funded Linkage Grant on religious diversity in SE Queensland, Ryan extends students’ horizons of learning, transforms their thinking, and fosters the skills and identities necessary for an inclusive Australia.

The Work and Research in Applied Psychology Team

Dr Natasha Matthews, Dr Mazlan Maskor and Mr Jordan Reutas

School of Psychology / Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences

Work Integrated Learning (WIL) programs that value and enhance student employability

“I want to use my degree to help people” is the motivation driving many students to undertake a degree in psychology. While traditionally, psychology students develop fundamental skills in understanding, measuring, and modifying behaviour, the application of this knowledge to “real-world” contexts where students have the opportunity to see the impact of their skills has not been available to undergraduate students. Work and Research in Applied Psychology (WRAP) is a work integrated learning (WIL) program developed to address this gap.

The core goals of WRAP are to provide students with: (1) diverse and individualised WIL opportunities reflecting the range of roles in which psychology graduates work, and (2) a foundation in self-directed learning skills making them job-ready graduates who are prepared to adapt to the ever-changing nature of work. First-hand experience in how psychology is applied in diverse industries acts as a window into non-traditional professional pathways and expands student conception of how their degree can be used to help others. Since its inception WRAP has greatly enhanced the employability of UQ psychology graduates, has expanded UQ’s impact in the community, and established UQ as a sector leader in psychology education.

CaLD Lab Team

Associate Professor Noriko Iwashita, Dr Seb Dianati, and Ms Franciele Spinelli

School of Languages and Cultures / Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Curriculum transformation and innovative pedagogy

The CaLD Lab team has addressed several unique and wide-ranging learning challenges faced at UQ; that is, how do students develop a sense of belonging and learn from their peers asynchronously? How does the student experience translate into the design of existing courses? In response, student partners were involved in all components of curriculum design in all 23 SSP projects, bridging the gap between student partnership and learning design, later published in IJSAP. Secondly, the team introduced new socio-emotive tools, interactive learning dashboards, new flipped learning approaches, and authentic e-assessment in order to tackle the challenges COVID presented. Lastly, they operationalised UQ's previous student strategy and strategic plan by offering a more flexible, authentic, blended, and partnered learning environment. The CaLD Lab team has become the largest school-wide student partnership initiative at UQ, the largest school-based Inspera eAssessment initiative in 2021, and the largest Microsoft Teams adoption in 2022. They have also led the largest course enhancement initiative within HASS by successfully blending, flipping, and moving online 32 various courses, with a third being in the Master of Applied Linguistics program. Their approach led to the support for the 2018 business case for Padlet and the institutional pilot and adoption of Flipgrid in 2022.

Digital Dental Team

Dr Sobia Zafar and Dr Jessica Zachar

School of Dentistry / Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences

Curriculum transformation and innovative pedagogy

For the past four years, the Digital Dental Team has provided technology-enhanced learning approaches and experiences for dentistry students enrolled in the Bachelor of Dental Science (Honours) program. The team has provided this learning support for over 400 dental students across multiple year levels (Years 2–4) and in eight courses. The introduction of authentic and innovative engaging learning experiences has enabled a transformative dental curriculum and the opportunity for students to expand their knowledge and achieve high skills in clinical competency, especially within the field of restorative dentistry, local anaesthesia, dental trauma, paediatric dentistry, and dental anatomy. The team continues to grow and explore new avenues of digital dentistry such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-dimensional printing and digital self-assessment aids. The team’s philosophy revolves around providing stimulating learning environments so that students can develop into well-rounded health professionals who can become leaders within the profession and local community, delivering optimum health care.