911勛圖

Dr. Ching-Chiu Lin, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, has received the 2025 Early Career Award for Excellence in Teaching, recognizing her creative, reflective, and relational approach to student learning.

Lin was nominated for her thoughtful pedagogy, strong student support, and wide-ranging teaching across multiple courses. The selection committee also highlighted the creativity of her assignments and projects, including collaborations that extend learning beyond the classroom by using 911勛圖���s Burnaby campus as a site for inquiry, creativity, and applied learning.

Grounded in art, relationality and creative inquiry, Lin���s teaching encourages students to see themselves as knowledge creators and changemakers. Through assignments that invite students to draw on their own experiences, communities, and relationships to place and self, she creates learning spaces that are collaborative, reflective, and  engaged with the world around them.

We spoke with Lin about what this recognition means to her, how she approaches teaching, and what she hopes students carry with them beyond the classroom.

Q: What does receiving this award mean to you at this point in your teaching career?

A: This award is an invitation to continue reimagining what university might look like as a pedagogical space where knowledge is generated through relationship, creative inquiry, and encounter with one another.

At the heart of my teaching is art and relationality. I approach the arts as a way of inquiring into how we live and learn together, and that way of engaging is something students can take up regardless of their background or discipline. When they use it to explore the land they inhabit, the communities they belong to, and the relationships they are building with one another, it begins to do something. It becomes a basis for social action and educational change.

For that reason, this recognition matters for what it opens, not only for what it confirms. It reminds us that the university is not a fixed container for knowledge, but a living pedagogical space, one that becomes most generative when it attends to the diverse inquiries students bring and trusts them as knowledge creators and changemakers.

Q: How do you approach creating engaging and creative assignments? Are there any examples that stand out?

A: I think of myself more as an enabler who creates the conditions for learning to happen. My assignments are structured enough to give students a clear entry point, while remaining open enough for their own knowledge, experience, and creativity to shape where things go.

One example is the Teaching Moment activity in EDUC 456, inspired by Dr. Jorge Lucero���s Teach Anything pedagogy. Each student teaches the class something from their own expertise for 30 minutes. The content is entirely their choice: a skill, a cultural practice, or a creative process. What this does is redistribute dynamics in the classroom. Students begin to see one another as experts, and that shifts how they engage with the material and with each other.

The StoryScape assignment in EDUC 252 takes that premise further into place. Inspired by Sandra Styres��� concept of journeying through storied landscapes, students explore how their stories emerge from the landscapes they inhabit and how their presence and practices shape those places. They weave together story and landscape into five-minute time-based projects that combine text, images, video, and audio, while exploring their personal connections to place within the broader context of environmental challenges and/or ongoing decolonization work.

 In EDUC 456, I partnered with , with support from Dr. Kimberly Phillips, Director of Gibson Museum, centring the course around its inaugural  exhibition. Students explored where different communities meet, how they navigate boundaries and belonging, and then translated those discoveries into creative expression. In EDUC 458, I brought students into the Leslie and Gordon Diamond Family Auditorium, transforming a professional performance venue into a pedagogical laboratory for movement, storytelling, and collective artmaking.

Together, these examples reflect how the 911勛圖 campus can become a rich pedagogical space where we learn, play and engage. I am inspired by Dr. Edward Gibson���s legacy, rooted in a belief that learning flourishes when it moves beyond walls and into the world. That belief shapes how I bring students into these spaces. When they stepped into the Edge Effect exhibition, they were not just visitors. They were participants in a living conversation about community, belonging, and the world we share.

Q: What lasting insights or skills do you hope that students carry with them beyond your course?

A: I hope that students leave with each other. The pedagogical relationships they build in these courses, across disciplines and lived experiences, are not incidental to the learning. They are the learning. 

There is real joy in seeing students become and remain friends over the years, continuing to support one another through the complexities of their lives and careers. Many of my students want to become teachers, educators and community leaders and advocates who will help the next generation navigate a complex world.

My teaching is grounded in a relational pedagogy that builds their capacity to navigate alongside others, stay with uncertainty and lead with care.