Teaching innovator wins European Award for Excellence in Teaching

THE University’s Director of Teaching, Learning and Student Experience in the School of Human and Health Sciences is the winner of the 2019 European Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities, conferred by the Central European University (CEU).

Dr Georgina Blakeley recently joined the University of Huddersfield from the Open University (OU), where she was the Director of Teaching and Deputy Head of School. 

Dr Blakeley originally honed her skills as an innovator in teaching and learning at the University of Huddersfield, where she spent 13 years prior to joining the OU, and where she rose to the position of Head of Politics. 

One of her early successes in teaching at Huddersfield at that time was her work around the creation of the Foundation Degree in Politics, an innovative distance-learning programme which was co-designed with employers for study by professionals in the local government and voluntary sectors.

During her time at the OU, between 2006 and 2019, Dr Blakeley focused on the production of distance-learning materials for entry-level introductory Social Science modules.  Such was her success that, in 2017, she received the OU Award for Innovation in Teaching and in the same year was shortlisted in the Most Innovative Teacher of the Year category of the THE Awards.  She received her most recent accolade in September, the CEU’s European Award for Excellence in Teaching, which is accompanied by the Diener Prize of €5,000.

Dr Blakeley is an active researcher and has published widely on Spanish politics, particularly around historical memory and democratisation, and is also on the editorial board for the International Journal of Iberian Studies.  She also publishes on issues of citizen participation and urban governance in England.

Though a great believer that research informs teaching, she also believes that teaching is still very much “a poor cousin” and that its importance should be more widely recognised and rewarded in its own right.

She personally enjoys teaching the newest students who are starting out in their studies.  “I think that should be the gold standard of our teaching because that is where you can make the most difference,” she explains.

“I believe that it is important to start from the student’s lived-experience and it’s that that makes the teaching real and authentic.  It is about teaching social sciences in a way that connects with the daily lives and experiences of the students,” she added.

In an interview for the Central European University, Dr Blakeley said that receiving the award was humbling and “an immense honour and privilege”.  She was also pleased that it recognises the importance of the social sciences and humanities as a subject, because, as she puts it, “in an era of populism, the value of the social sciences and humanities is under question by many governments around the world”.