November 8, 2022
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
This session has been cancelled due to low registration.
Much has been written on the development of the teaching portfolio and the crafting of a teaching philosophy or a research plan. Although the philosophy statement expresses and demonstrates teaching practices, approaches, and rationale, there is an even deeper and more essential level to our teaching and research lives that deserves time and attention: our ultimate aims as academics.
Using established techniques for building and defining mission statements for individuals and organizations, this interactive session will invite participants to reflect on the most deeply felt values and aspirations that they hold as teachers, researchers and university members and how to refine and distill those values into a succinct and inspiring mission statement.
Our Presenter
Elizabeth Wells is the former Dean of Arts and Pickard-Bell Chair in Music at Mount Allison University. She earned her Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto with a concentration in History and Literature of Music. Following this, she pursued a career in public broadcasting, working as a music programmer and producer of classical music programs for CJRT-FM in Toronto. In 1993, she entered the graduate program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. Her dissertation, entitled West Side Story(s): Perspectives on a Great American Musical, was supported by the three dissertation fellowships, including the AMS-50 Dissertation Fellowship awarded annually to the most promising doctoral research in musicology in North America. In 2011 her first book was published by Scarecrow Press and she won the Music in American Culture award of the American Musicological Society.
She has presented papers on musicology and music history pedagogy at national and international conferences. In addition, she has given guest lectures and has been an invited speaker on musical theatre, most notably at Harvard University. Her work has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Studies in Musical Theatre.
Before coming to Mount Allison, Elizabeth taught music history at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Geneseo, and the Eastman School of Music. In 2008 she won the Tucker Teaching Award, Mount Allison’s highest recognition of teaching excellence, and the Association of Atlantic Universities’ Distinguished Teacher Award and was named a 3M National Teaching Fellow in 2010.
Her research interests include music history pedagogy, British musical theatre of the 1950s, and American musical theatre at mid-century. Elizabeth has developed innovative courses including one on the Beatles and a course supported by the Vice-President’s Curricular Innovation fund entitled “Music and Difference,” which addresses music’s role in mediating and expressing difference. She has also taught a course on pedagogy and fundamentals of teaching for undergraduates.
She is author of the book The Organized Academic: How to transform your academic life, available in Fall 2022.