The Educate North Teaching Excellence Award 2019

Since 2016, I’ve been facilitating the organisation of the University of Chester Archaeology Student Conferences. This serves final-year single honours archaeology students as a formative element of their module HI6001 Archaeology and Contemporary Society, exploring dimensions and themes in public archaeology and the politics of archaeology. Each year, we’ve taken a different theme, with the events to date as following:

In addition, I’ve decided to develop each of these conferences forward to publication as academic peer-reviewed edited collections. Each book will combine select student contributions with those of heritage professionals and academics. The first book is now published with Equinox Publishing: The Public Archaeology of Death.

My last discussion of the conferences and books can be found here.

I was delighted to learn last month that I had been shortlisted for the Educate North award for Teaching Excellence for my work on the student conferences. Last evening, at the Hilton Hotel in Manchester, I joined colleagues from the University at the Educate North awards ceremony.

Guess what? I won! I’m officially the winner of the Educate North Teaching Excellence Award for 2019! Here is the full list of 2019 winners in other categories, including lots of others from the University of Chester.

In my short acceptance speech, I thanked my colleagues in the Department of History and Archaeology for their support in this venture.

I also thanked the publishers of the first book – Equinox – and the scheduled publishers for the second and third volumes – Archaeopress. Finally, I thanked the students who participated as organisers and speakers, and those that wished to be authors and editors in the book projects. I should also add thanks to the Grosvenor Museum for hosting the event and the guest speakers who made each conference such distinctive and memorable events.

Congratulations to all those shortlisted for this award and to all those shortlisted and winners of the other categories on the evening. It was a good night for Chester, with 5 awards plus Chester’s outgoing but still extant VC – Canon Professor Tim Wheeler – gaining a lifetime achievement award.