The ‘innovative teaching’ and ‘outstanding support’ offered by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) has led to nominations in the country’s most prestigious higher education awards.
DMU has been recognised in two of the categories in this year’s Times Higher Education Awards, it was announced.
Senior Lecturer Dr Momodou Sallah has been nominated as Most Innovative Teacher of the Year for organising a series of international field trips to The Gambia, helping give students first hand experiences helping develop communities and immersing them in Gambian culture and history.
And a series of support sessions, seminars and activities offered to improve the writing skills of DMUs researchers is in the running to win the Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers award.
The THE Awards are known as the ‘Oscars’ of the higher education sector and highlight the very best, most creative, innovative and impactful work going on among HE institutions nationwide.
These two nominations underline DMUs commitment to academic excellence and building a scholarly community, working in partnership with other organisations to create a truly global institution.
The nomination for Dr Sallah – a Senior Lecturer in Youth, Community and Education - was for a series of international work experience trips he organised to The Gambia, taking the classroom out into the real world.
The pioneering trips involved students helping to set up a business development hub for young Gambians; staying with local families; attending local seminars and lectures and learning about colonialism and globalisation.
The trips were developed with the support of community engagement campaign group Global Hands and DMU’s international experience programme #DMUglobal.
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Meanwhile, the nominated entry in the Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers award was for a range of initiatives created at DMU to help improve researchers’ writing skills.
The assistance was provided collaboratively between learning developers, postgraduate research students and supervisors and took the form of Monthly Thesis Drop-Ins and writing sessions, writing seminars and the creation of an annual summer writing retreat.
As a result this was noted as one of the most positive elements of their DMU experience by postgraduate research students and was identified as exemplary at the last institutional audit of research degrees in 2013.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony held in London on Thursday 26 November.
Posted on Thursday 3 September 2015