Feature Speaker and Chief Judge: Prof. Reynold Macpherson
Topic: Olympiad
Prof. Reynold Macpherson qualified as a primary school teacher in New Zealand before serving overseas for thirty years. In his travels he gained a BA in Mathematics and Management, taught at secondary level, completed an MED Admin by research in secondary school leadership, and when teaching at tertiary level, did his PhD in system management and leadership. Major consultancies and international invitations followed. He was contracted to provide advice to the Picot Committee that reconstructed educational administration in New Zealand, and was a member of Brian Scott’s core team that restructured the New South Wales school and technical education systems. In 1997 he was appointed Director of the centre for Professional Development at the University of Auckland. In this role he was primarily concerned with the helping of staff to improve their research, teaching and leadership, and with developing organisational learning. He has published extensively and has been awarded a number of fellowships. Among his books are Educative Leadership, Falmer Press, and Educative Accountability: Research, Theory, Policies and Practice, Elsevier Sciences – Pergamon Press. His research has also focussed on how information and communication technology impact on higher education, particularly web-enhanced teaching, flexible learning and supervising research online.
Judges
Prof. Pat Rogers, Professor of Mathematics and Education at York University, is Chair of the International Consortium for Education Development (ICED), having just completed a five-year term as President of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). As Director of York’s Centre for the Support of Teaching, Pat has developed guidelines for documenting teaching accomplishments, and designed and implemented a variety of professional development programmes for faculty and graduate teaching assistants which have been adopted by other institutions across Canada. Pat has received a range of honours and scholarly awards including STLHE’s 3M Teaching Fellowship and the Polya Lectureship of the Mathematical Association of America. She has been invited to adjudicate teaching award competitions, to undertake programme reviews, and to give workshops and plenary speeches on a variety of teaching and learning topics across North America, and in Britain, Europe, China and Australia.
Dr. Rakesh Bhanot is an Indian by birth and has been based in the U.K. since 1961. After graduating in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick, he taught English in a number of institutions across Europe. He has presented papers and run workshops on staff and educational development in over 25 countries. Following a secondment from Luton University (where he was the Professional Development Manager) in order to coordinate a number of European projects concerning public broadcasting and ethnic minorities, he joined Coventry University as Programme Manager for the postgraduate courses in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education in 1998. He is the Chair of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Conference Committee and also a member of the SEDA Publications Committee. He is currently co-editing a volume on the theme of Computer and Information Technology in Higher Education. One of his main areas of interest is “cultural and linguistic diversity in education” and he recently presented a paper on this at a national conference in the U.S. He is also carrying out research on potential bias in U.K. postgraduate programmes in learning and teaching from the perspective of participating academics from other cultural backgrounds who are employed in British universities. He is the current President of the Warwick Graduate Association.
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