Duffy Roberts has been teaching at UBC since 2007, with a focus on Postcolonial Literature, Canadian Literature, Vancouver Literature, poetry and scholarly writing. His courses offer innovative approaches in both course design and assignments. His 2013W course, “‘All They Do Is Smoke Weed and Stare At Nature In Vancouver!’: When Space Becomes Place In Van-City Contexts” invited students to deep map place: to be inspired by the stories and poetry of Vancouver to investigate a textured Vancouver. Assignments for the course mixed conventional academic essays with innovative “fieldwork” like an infographic mapping of Vancouver, a cultural artefact project requiring insights into objects found in Vancouver, and media projects that responded to the question “how does place turn into home?”
In all of his courses, Duffy’s goal is to “activate voice”—to enable critical and creative thinking about phenomenon that interest students. To this end, his “Strategies for University Writing” course is focused on scholarly writing about higher education, including the importance, the contradictions, and the failures of current discourse on post-secondary education and its impact on individual students.
Duffy’s students from across the university have praised his courses and his teaching, noting that he challenges his students to think in new ways, even as he encourages them to recognize that learning is a lifetime project…
Duffy’s students from across the university have praised his courses and his teaching, noting that he challenges his students to think in new ways, even as he encourages them to recognize that learning is a lifetime project: he is “extremely insightful,” even “captivating,” and “his analogies and lessons in class are both entertaining and thought-provoking, making this class exceptional for my personal life and my learning.” And that course on Vancouver? “Reaaaally mindblowing. Not the conventional prof who’d give lectures and just mark. Shows very clear concern for student’s learning, and really tries his best to make sure we grow as students, as writers, as thinkers, and as people.”
The Ian Fairclough Teaching Prize is awarded annually to a sessional lecturer in the Department of English and/or the UBC Writing Centre. The Prize was established in 1996 as a memorial to Ian W. Fairclough (1951-1995), who obtained his BA (Hons.) and MA in the Department of English, and taught as a sessional lecturer for a number of years both in the Department of English and in the UBC Writing Centre.
