Dr. Matt Price Wins Teaching Award

July 17, 2017 by Department of History Staff

We are pleased to share the news that Dr. Matt Price is the inaugural winner of the Kathleen O’Connell Teaching Excellent Award.

The award recognizes the outstanding teaching and contributions of a sessional instructor to the pedagogical mission of New College in its academic programs, interdisciplinary courses and Writing Centre.

Along with teaching NEW103/113H: Digital Technology, Dr. Price is also a sessional instructor in the Department of History teaching HIS393H1-S: Digital History and HIS455Y1-Y: Hacking History: Digital Projects Capstone Class. Please see the full award citation below.

Dr. Matt Price’s work in NEW103/113H: Digital Technology has drawn the highest praise from students and colleagues for its innovative approaches to linking technology and community engaged learning and for the quality of engagement achieved in classroom.  The nomination for the award describes Dr. Price’s teaching as life transforming and foregrounds his ability to create community in the classroom and to foster genuinely open discussion.   

Dr. Price's teaching draws on both his training as a historian and philosopher of science, and his active engagement in a range of social and political movements. Much of his work addresses the intimate and bidirectional relationships between technological development and sociocultural transformation. His principal pedagogical interests include encouraging students to explore disciplinary domains beyond their comfort zones, and promoting scholarly engagement with pressing social concerns and with local communities. He is currently one of the technical directors of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a network of scholars and activists dedicated to protecting the integrity of environmental science in the US during the current Presidential administration. He is also one of the two founders of "University of Toronto Outdoors", an initiative to strengthen outdoor education at U of T which grows out of the founders' experiences bringing students to the Indian Himalaya.