Faculty Profiles
Lynda Loewen | 2024 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award Recipient (video)
Lynda Loewen has worked at CMU for over 15 years, first as a sessional instructor and today as Teaching Assistant Professor of Psychology. In the 2024/25 academic year, she taught Interpersonal Communication, Counseling Theories, Counseling Techniques, and Trauma and Resilience. She also works as a therapist, her first vocation, which she has been doing since 2008.
Loewen and John Brubacher, Associate Professor of Biology, are co-recipients of the 2024 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award. The award, established in 2022, is granted annually to two faculty members who best exemplify CMU's commitment to excellent teaching.
How would you describe your teaching philosophy? Has it evolved over the years?
There might be somebody who can answer that question in a sentence and with simplicity, but if so, it is not I. As I teach for longer and as I get older, I think I have better clarity about what it is that students struggle with and what it is they actually need. Students increasingly do not feel equipped to do university, and I feel it is my job to help them with that. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that students can't do university—but an increasing number of them come in feeling pretty intimidated and overwhelmed. For a lot of reasons, they maybe haven't built those skills in high school, to do rigorous research, to write well-structured essays, to understand what citation means and why it's important, to use the library. These are skills some students have in abundance, but every year, the percentage of students that don't have those skills rock solid goes up.
How does that affect your teaching?
The content of what I teach hasn't changed for the most part. Where I've made the biggest changes is at the start of the school year, how I on-ramp students. I'll bring them to the library as a field trip, and they'll already be looking up materials for their final paper in the very first class. For almost all my assignments, students have to meet with me and tell me what their idea is and bring their resources with them. It's been a big surprise to me, how helpful it is to students. They've had sign off from me that they're on the right track and that gives them so much more confidence. When I recognized that students weren't disinterested, they were scared, and once I learned the difference, it just told me what I needed to do.
What strategies do you use to engage and inspire your students?
The fact that I go back and forth from being a clinician to being a professor keeps me sharp in terms of the immediacy of ideas. I'm not reminding myself that these are real concepts and they have real impact, because my clients just showed me yesterday in session. I think everyone who teaches here would say the same thing: we see the interconnectedness of life with theory. It's not dry or boring to us, it's alive to us. I think even though we could characterize young people as having some challenges or limitations that my generation didn't have, they also have some abilities, gifts, and strengths that my generation didn't have. I find that incredibly encouraging, that the future is going to be in capable hands; my students convey that to me all the time. They give me hope.
People don't want to be apathetic, people don't want to be cool—that's not our natural posture. That's not how we are when we're fully alive. Students are just like everybody else, they just want to be in an environment where they get to be as enthused and curious as they need to be in order to learn well. When we forget ourselves for a moment and we're just lost in the learning together, when that happens, that is magic.
How do you measure success in your classroom?
Students showing up for class is a really good sign. I think attendance at CMU is very good, and that's because we're a teaching university and we're really good at it. Students recognize that, so they come to class. During and after Covid, when I would walk into my classes to start class, my classrooms would be silent. They would be full of students, but the students were all on their devices and none of them were talking to each other. There would be a couple of exceptions, but it was standard for years that the students would be silent when I walked into the classroom. That never happens anymore. When I walk into the classroom to get ready, they are abuzz! They are all talking to each other, having a conversation about their lives, but they're talking about their lives through the lens of the things we're learning in class. That happens over and over again, and I can't think of anything nicer than that. Part of it is because students have decided they did not like what life was like when they were separated from each other. That's one of the things I mean about the younger generation—they've had to wrestle with things in a different way, and they're figuring some things out nice and early in their lives.
How do you balance academic rigour with making learning enjoyable for your students?
The one feeds into the other. Students want to be academically rigorous, that's why they're here. They want to learn from people who are experts in the field, their professors, guest speakers, what they're reading. It's this whole business of feeling capable, feeling like they're doing it right, like they're not posers. When they know they can meet the learning objectives, they dive into the academic rigour. So it's not mutually exclusive at all.
What impact do you hope to leave on your students?
I've used the word confidence already, but I would wish for them to be confident in their own abilities. When we teach students to respect their own capacity, intellectual capacity but also their capacity to do really challenging things, it teaches them to respect other people in the same way, and I think that's incredibly important. Students accept your expertise both because you're an expert, but also because you respect their thinking and the way they enter into the world. I would wish for them that they would always have that ability for that kind of mutual respect. I actually find people delightful—I delight in my students, and I think they can tell.
Previous recipients of the Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award:
2023
- Jodi Dueck-Read, Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution Studies and Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies
- Dr. Candice Viddal, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics
2022
- David Balzer, Associate Professor of Communications and Media
- Karen Ridd, Teaching Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies, and of Conflict Resolution Studies
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