Award Recipients

Dr. Patrick Burke is a leading expert in the field of materials science and manufacturing and has worked for Humber College for over 16 years in various capacities.

Currently, he has served as an extremely diligent Program Coordinator for the Bachelor in Industrial Design (BID) program for over 10 years. During this tenure, he was responsible for spearheading numerous initiatives that helped push the BID degree into a reputable program of choice for many. He has also taught courses in the BID program within the materials science and manufacturing domain, a subject matter that he holds close to his heart.

He helped strategically manage and successively facilitate the licence renewal of the BID program in 2013 and more recently in 2019. Dr. Burke has served as a beacon of hope and encouragement in his capacity as PC for over 10 years. His ability to listen and systematically analyze strategic initiatives put forward by faculty helped to nurture and promote the new stream in interaction design for the BID program. This initiative was successfully approved by PEQAB in the 2019 license renewal.

Dr. Burke has consistently helped promote the annual Industrial Design Thesis Shows each year with improved industry participation. He has always supported and encouraged individual faculty to achieve and strive for high levels of academic success and delivery of industrial design education.

Additionally, he has always treated students with respectand encouraged them to strive for higher goals while conducting their design enquiries. He is always calm, composed, enthusiastic and excited about helping faculty and students in overcoming their challenges.

Jasteena through her own experience and example embodies the values of service, commitment, and innovation that we strive to imbue and inspire in our students. Jasteena has taught in the paralegal and international development programs from the perspective that our clients - whether they be vulnerable to the law or to global crises - are entitled to dignity and respect. By providing compassion and professional advice, Jasteena teaches her students that paralegal and development professionals have the ability and duty to empower their clients to fight for their rights and justice.

Jasteena came to Humber after working as an advocate in Ontario with newcomers and victims of domestic violence at a time when this was not openly dealt with in many communities. Then as a lawyer with vulnerable communities in Canada at the Office of the Children's Lawyer, Ministry of Attorney. After law school, she worked internationally for over 2 decades as a human rights lawyer all over the world.

Based on her experience as an international human rights lawyer for over 20 years and before coming to Humber, Jasteena gained a unique understanding of the local and global crises in places many of our students come from. She believes that this empowers students to achieve and excel. Jasteena supports students to engage in the class from their own reality, thereby respecting their lived experiences.

Jasteena has been integral to the courses in international development and the first international community development course in our Community Development degree. This uses the work of field practitioners from all over the Global South and developing world and ground breaking research to put students in the heart of the issues and challenges that they will face - to prepare them for the important work of caring and supporting humanity in these troubled times.

Professor Harris' teaching practice sits upon a bedrock of commitment to provide insight and learning to whomever is within his circle of influence. He is genuinely passionate about advancing learning and advocacy in whatever way he is able.

Professor Harris serves as co-lead for the 2SLGBTQ+ employee resource group, committee member of the English Department's Equity and Diversity Recruitment and Retention Committee and Fiction Editor for The Humber Literary Review. It should be noted that he served as editor for The Review while he was still a Partial Load professor and before there was even talk of compensation. He did so because he believes in fostering spaces where new literary voices can be heard.

Professor Harris Leads By Example In Fostering EDI Within His Classrooms. Professor Harris, regarding being equity focused, in his own words,"Even though it can be challenging to do so, I always identify myself as a member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community at the beginning of each semester, and I make the process for any student to choose their preferred name and pronouns in my class as simple as possible. As a result of this, I often have students let me know that they are also part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. One memorable student was so appreciative of the accepting environment I had created in class that they gave me a plant at the end of the semester. I still have it, and I think of the student when I take care of it!"

Professor Harris continues to display steadfast commitment to fostering and strengthening the tenets of equity at Humber College through every area in which he holds influence. He has leveraged virtually every talent/skill set that he possesses for the benefit and health of Humber's culture, both inside and outside of the classroom. He leads by example, he leads by listening and he leads by being and advocate of innovative learning.

Chandra is an innovative and creative educator who is constantly experimenting with new approaches and tools to engage her students and to help them to perfect their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. She is always looking for new tools and approaches to engage her students and to make her teaching and learning materials more accessible to them. Chandra also shares her teaching and learning innovations with her colleagues in the Department of English, the wider Humber community, and in the larger post-secondary community in Ontario.

She presents her leaning materials to her students in a variety of formats to ensure that UDL principles are being embraced and enacted. For example, she presents her materials in a variety of forms including accessible Word and .pdf files, videos (especially in Lumen5 and Panopto – always with captions), H5P interactive learning objects (described in more detail above), social annotation (also see above), and even radio play versions of the case studies that she has developed for her students. Another important thing that Chandra does to make her materials accessible, and to help her students succeed by extension, is to scaffold her assignments carefully. Chandra’s commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging can be seen in the assessments that she creates, in the way that she designs and runs her classes, and in the work that she has been doing in the English department to recruit and retain equity-deserving faculty. It can also be seen in college-wide initiatives that she has been involved in such as the work that she has done with the committee that is working to ensure that our SFQ process more closely supports Humber’s commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

Chandra is involved in an incredibly wide range of initiatives that are designed to support her students and her colleagues. Not only does Chandra provide official mentorship for new faculty, she also provides an incredible amount of unofficial peer-to-peer mentorship and support, whether that is providing a last-minute activity to a colleague who was too busy grading to prepare a lesson, or carefully reviewing larger departmental projects. Her door, whether real or virtual, is always open to the people she teaches with. Her approach to building and maintaining a culture of sharing is one of the things that makes the Department of English such an amazing place to teach.

If Humber had a Hall of Fame, Michael Rosen would be in the "Builders" category.

He is the founding Program Coordinator for Humber's Bachelor of Creative Advertising Degree program, which from its inception rapidly established itself as the premier advertising program in Canada, and has since developed hundreds of stellar professionals for the Canadian and international advertising industry;

Academically he helped break new ground in introducing degree-level education to Humber;

And 16 years after he first launched the BoCA program, he was instrumental in developing the unique modular graduate program in Art Direction that integrated with the existing Graduate Accounts Management and Graduate Copywriting program to create new opportunities for shared learning and professional-level collaboration among the three disciplines.