Faculty Research Excellence Award Winners

Sheliza Ibrahim, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream

Sheliza is involved in numerous research projects that all center around university pedagogy, with a focus on inclusive and antiracist pedagogies. She co-chairs the Threshold Concepts working group, which provides a platform for her research on students' positionality in their mathematics learning; she is leading a project that investigates the relationship between social justice moments during the pandemic and social justice reform at post-secondary institutions; she's involved in a collaboration between the Peel District School Board and UTM, which focuses on racialized students; and I don’t have time to list her leadership and involvement in numerous other projects, including research on Islamophobia, and generative AI.

All of these initiatives have yielded a productive research agenda, with numerous publications, workshops, and so many conference presentations that it was difficult to count. While this extensive body of research certainly qualifies her for this award, what really stood out to the committee was her commitment to collaboration and collegiality. She partners with faculty within ISUP, within UTM more broadly, as well as with faculty at OISE, faculty at other Canadian institutions like Brock, York, Western, and beyond Canada to the Institute of Technology in Jamaica, and she's even involved in research with the Peel District School Board on racialized students’ transition to university.

We are therefore happy to present Sheliza Ibrahim with this year’s ISUP Faculty Research Award, not just because of all the research she’s done, but also because of the kind of researcher that she is.

Zhaozhe Wang, Assistant Professor

The team was  impressed by the depth and breadth of research that Zhaozhe has done over the past year or two. From a forthcoming book, to transnational and translingual research published in a wide array of high quality journals, to recent research on language and artificial intelligence. Zhaozhe's research has had an outstanding impact on the scholarship of teaching and learning from many angles. Zhaozhe's research has had a profound and widespread impact on writing studies and SoTL research across North America.