Alumni Award for Engaging Students as Partners in Learning

The Principal's Alumni Award for Engaging Students as Partners in Learning, formerly the Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award, recognizes innovative curricular design and instructional approaches where educators, instructors, and learners work together to achieve deep and meaningful learning. This award is given to recognize an individual who engages students as partners, lending power to student voices and supporting them to become the champions of their educational journeys. 

This award became a partnership between the Principal's Office and the Queen's University Alumni Association (QUAA) in 2023. Both partners respectfully acknowledge past recipients of the Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award for their contributions to the Queen's community. 

Learn more about this award, criteria, nominations, and recognition.

2022 Recipient

Dr. Michelle Searle

Dr. Searle

Dr. Searle holds a PhD in curriculum with a focus on assessment and evaluation. She has experience leading research and evaluation teams in the fields of education and health. Her research focuses on increasing the usefulness of program evaluation through a focus on collaborative evaluation approaches and innovative forms of knowledge dissemination that enhance capacity within organizations. By using mixed and multiple methods that are often infused with Arts, she gains a deeper understanding of the phenomena under study and uses this knowledge to inform policy, practice, and scholarship. As a researcher and evaluator, she is guided by two decades of experiences as a classroom teacher in international and local contexts. Dr. Searle has taught across multiple subject areas with large and small groups of learners in traditional, blended, and online learning environments and goes above and beyond for her students.