Winners of Teaching Excellence Awards 2025 announced
These annual awards celebrate exceptional contributions to education and teaching practices by colleagues at all career stages.
The 2025 awards are presented in three categories:
- Individual Awards for Academic Staff
- Individual Awards for Academic Staff (Early Career Strand)
- Achievement Award for Sustained Commitment to Education
Professor Timothy Power, Head of the Social Sciences Division, said: ‘The Teaching Excellence Awards are an opportunity to celebrate the outstanding work of our colleagues and their dedication to innovation in education. It is wonderful to see such a variety of activity across our departments, and in particular to recognise exceptional teaching across a range of career stages. Many congratulations to this year’s winners.’
Individual Awards for Academic Staff – Early Career Strand
Our very own Jonathon Turnbull has been recognised for his innovative teaching practices through the development of the elective course ‘Digital Ecologies: Mediating More-than-human Worlds’. This course, designed for students across all five MSc programmes at the School of Geography and the Environment, encourages students to explore how digital technologies mediate human-nature relations in various contexts such as environmental governance, conservation, surveillance, art, and entertainment.
Dr Turnbull’s course integrates perspectives from human geography, anthropology, new media studies, political ecology, and the environmental humanities to critically challenge commonly held assumptions that digital technologies separate humans from nature; that they will solve socioenvironmental crises; and that digital mediation is immaterial.
The course involves a series of experimental informal assessments including a handwritten assignment (to invoke the materiality of digital technologies) and a student-led public exhibition called ‘Nature Buffering’, which have been positively received by students.
‘Experimental approaches are central to my teaching. Collaboration is thus essential for my teaching success. I’m grateful to the brilliant cohorts I’ve had the pleasure of working and learning with on my “Digital Ecologies” MSc module at the School of Geography and the Environment. This award is as much theirs!’