Sherwin Tjia

Jean-Guy Belley

Faculty of Law

John W. Durford Teaching Excellence Award

The most influential lesson I gathered was at a graduate research seminar with my masters degree supervisor. The seminar was focussed on the empirical aspects and practical problems of access to justice for ordinary people. Every week the participating students provided the class with the new data and insights they had respectively discovered through their personal field study as it evolved. So every class was a moment of discovery and co-operative learning.

The ideal is to put yourself in the position of learning something new with every year's group of students and at every classroom meeting.

Over the years I have prepared new teaching notes to highlight aspects that were ignored or undervalued previously; and convinced myself again and again that my understanding of a case or a scholarly article can always be ameliorated, challenged and fine-tuned.

The best moments are those when the classroom interaction reveals that at least some students and the teacher were driven, through their respective reading and reflection, to a common set of intriguing, perplexing or fundamental aspects of the subject matter.