York lecturers win national accolade for teaching
Posted on 27 June 2006
Dr Mary Luckhurst and Dr Peter Thompson are among 50 university staff across the country to be given fellowships.
The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS), sponsored by the Guardian, recognises and rewards individual excellence in teaching in higher education.
The 50 winners, chosen from a record 242 nominations submitted by higher education institutions across England and Northern Ireland, will each receive awards of £10,000 to support their learning and teaching.
Dr Mary Luckhurst, of the Department of English and Related Literature, is a Senior Lecturer in drama, who designed and co-directs the new drama degrees under the title of ‘Writing and Performance’. Recognised as an “initiative of national excellence” in the Guardian 2005 and 2006 university rankings, it has helped to inspire the University’s new Department of Theatre, Film and TV.
Dr Luckhurst, who previously spent ten years in theatre as a director, producer, literary manager and playwright, has introduced a visitor programme, which attracts high-profile practitioners, including Penelope Wilton, Sam West and David Edgar, to the University to run workshops and master classes.
Together with her colleague Mike Cordner, she established a drama and film manuscript archive at the University of York. Major playwrights, television and film writers have donated scripts to the Samuel Storey Drama Manuscript Archive.
Dr Luckhurst said: “I'm absolutely thrilled. This Fellowship is recognition of the outstanding and innovative nature of the Writing and Performance initiative at the University of York. I'm looking forward to setting up international theatre projects in Asia, South Africa and the States and making York a place of global theatre exchange.”
This Fellowship is recognition of the outstanding and innovative nature of the Writing and Performance initiative at the University of York
Dr Luckhurst
Dr Peter Thompson, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, is also credited with being an inspiring teacher - part of his third-year course ‘When vision fails’, for example, was delivered in the local branch of Vision Express. Students were able to interrogate a trained optometrist about the various tests carried out in a routine eye-examination and to conduct some of the tests themselves.
In 1999 he was awarded a British Association/Royal Society Millennium Fellowship to create a scale model of the solar system along 10km of a York cycle track.
In 2001 he developed an internationally successful teaching product, ‘viperlib’ – a visual perception library with over 2,300 images from across the world. This was enhanced in 2005 with Viper2go, which provides ready-made tutorials for teachers and learners and has already proved popular.
Dr Thompson said: "I am very pleased to receive this award. Enormous credit goes to the students because their response is the reason one teaches. What I’ve learned over the years is that teaching difficult material can be fun, and making it fun helps students to want to learn."
In 2005, Dr John Issitt, from the Department of Educational Studies, and Dr Robert Partridge, Director of the Student Skills Development Unit (currently Acting Director of the University’s Careers Service), both won National Teaching Fellowships.
Notes to editors:
- More information on the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York is available at www.york.ac.uk/depts/engl/more_about.htm.
- More information on the department of Psychology at the University of York is available at www.york.ac.uk/depts/psych/www/about/.