We are delighted to announce the winners of the Keele Excellence Awards 2021.

The Keele Excellence Awards celebrate excellence, innovation, and outstanding contributions from staff who inspire learners and colleagues.

The scheme brings together both the Learning and Teaching awards, and the awards to recognise staff who make a significant impact, over and above role expectations, in line with the University’s strategic themes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to new challenges for the majority of our staff. Throughout 2020 and beyond, all staff responded swiftly and positively to those challenges and the restrictions we have faced.

Dr Rafe Hallett, Director of the Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence commented:

“This year we have two winners in the general Learning and Teaching category, Dr Pawas Bisht and Dr Eva Giraud, and they both come from the School of Media Communications and Creative Practice. Both of these applications showed fantastic innovation in teaching and learning coming out of that School, and in particular the links to civic organisations and collaboration with community partners. We also gave out an early career award to Hannah Gibbons-Jones from the School of Law, and the sophistication of Hannah's position, a hybrid of learning and teaching design and student support, particularly impressed the panel. Hannah has transformed the way students are supported and the way their professional as well as academic experience in development as have been designed in a school.

“We also gave a specific award around student learning to Scott Chesworth from the Library and Scott actually has a sector-wide profile now in the fantastic transformative things he's done around induction and introducing students to library resources. Congratulations to all of our winners this year!”

2021 Learning and Teaching award winners

• Scott Chesworth - Keele Excellence Award Supporting Student Learning
• Hannah Gibbons-Jones - Keele Excellence Award Supporting Student Learning
• Pawas Bisht - Keele Excellence Award Learning and Teaching (General Award)
• Eva Giraud - Keele Excellence Award Learning and Teaching (General Award)

Scott Chesworth

Scott Chesworth is Liaison and Research Support Librarian and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy based in the Library’s Academic Services team within the Information and Digital Services directorate. Scott provides support to the Natural Science schools of Chemical and Physical Sciences; Psychology and the Foundation Year. He also supports research staff and postgraduate researchers.

Since joining Keele in 2015, Scott has created innovative practices to support information literacy skills development for staff and students across the University. His work in creating and facilitating Library Escape Room activities have become popular events in the Keele calendar for students as well as academic and professional support teams, whilst helping to make the development of key information retrieval skills enjoyable. With the move to online learning, Scott has applied creativity and initiative to develop the digital Library Escape Room using Microsoft OneNote and delivered sessions over Microsoft Teams to great success.

Eva Giraud 

Eva Haifa Giraud is a Senior Lecturer in Media, whose research explores how activists negotiate tensions associated with the media platforms they use: particularly the challenges posed by social media. In addition, she has a broad interest in critical and cultural theory, particularly theoretical frameworks for understanding contemporary environmental politics.

Eva’s approach to teaching is informed by critical and feminist pedagogies, which aim to inspire students through experiential, dialogical learning. Since joining Keele in 2014 she has aimed to make difficult theoretical materials in media and cultural studies accessible to students, introducing new learning methodologies at the level of individual modules and redesigning the core media curriculum to better scaffold students’ understanding.

Dr Pawas Bisht 

Dr Pawas Bisht is a Lecturer in Media, Communications & Creative Practice in the School of Humanities. Over the past four years, Pawas has led an innovative teaching project called ‘Stoke Stories’ to embed social learning and civic engagement into documentary filmmaking education undertaken by undergraduate media students. Starting in 2018, each year, Pawas

Dr Bisht has facilitated successful collaborations between students and local community groups in the production of short documentary films exploring a range of different socially relevant themes: ‘Stoke- City of Culture’ (2018), ‘Ageing and Creativity’ (2019), ‘Pandemic Stories’ (2020). These creative partnerships have been extremely enriching and empowering for both students and the community. Students have reported a significant deepening of their sense of personal transformation, social commitment, and creative satisfaction in the learning process.

In relation to community, Pawas’s work deepens Keele’s civic commitments, and provides much-needed voice and representation to the local region with the films being curated online on the Stoke-Stories archive. Pawas has also actively communicated his learnings from the project to benefit teaching at Keele (case study resource for KIITE’s social curriculum design framework; Keele Education Conferences 2021 & 2019) and in wider national contexts (Media Education Summit 2021; ESRC Festival of Social Sciences 2019).

Hannah Gibbons-Jones 

Hannah joined Keele University in September 2017 and holds a dual role in the School of Law as Lecturer and Learning Development Fellow. Hannah is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and currently teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes where she specialises in Family and Child Law. In her role as Learning Development Fellow, Hannah supports students to develop their study skills within a subject based focus.

In Learning Development sessions, Hannah provides students with one-to-one academic support based, focusing on individual learning needs. She encourages peer support by holding year group events and supports students to explore legal scholarship and research from first year to postgraduate research. Hannah has created a library of learning tools for law students to use during their studies and uses her pedagogic experience to contribute to the teaching and learning focus of the School of Law, participating with colleagues in research on legal education.

Find out more about all of the winners of the Keele Excellence Awards 2021, and watch the virtual awards ceremony here.