Dr. Pauline Sameshima Named OAEA “Post Secondary Teacher of the Year”

Dr. Pauline Sameshima (Professor, Faculty of Education) has been awarded the Post Secondary Teacher of the Year, 2022 award by the Ontario Art Education Association (OAEA).

The OAEA recognizes excellence in Visual and Media Arts education, and honours visual art schools and community educators who exemplify standards of quality in art education in Ontario.

Pauline was nominated for the award by Andrew Dean, Vice President, Research and Innovation at Lakehead University, for her numerous and significant contributions to the arts. As written in the nomination letter:

"Since her arrival as the Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Studies (a first in this field) at Lakehead University in 2012, Pauline has continued to promote the arts and alternative representations of research knowledge as ways to engage and stimulate thought, conversation, and learning across wide audiences, disciplines, and communities. Her work provides extensive opportunities for artistic expression and learning, and introduces new artistic techniques and arts integrating methodological approaches to the university community, the Thunder Bay community locally, and internationally through the galleries she curates… Her leadership and contributions to art education here at Lakehead, in our community, and internationally through her research and curation are richly deserving of this award.”

Some of Pauline’s notable achievements include:

• opening and curating seven Galleries spaces: six on-site campus locations plus a virtual gallery that hosts local, national, and international juried art exhibitions as well as featured art work. The galleries are used to teach about local research, build community and research capacity, and showcase local community artists in an academic setting;
• publishing Parallaxic Praxis: Multimodal Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Research Design (2020), an arts integrating methodology book that won a Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award;
• creating her own artwork. One artwork was recently selected as one of the 80 of 425 submissions to be exhibited in the 2022 National Art Education Association’s Members’ Juried Exhibition;
• participating in a current research project with a large scientific research team on a 26.5 million USD National Institutes of Health grant. Pauline leads the Community Arts Integrated Research program for this grant, which seeks to develop, with scientists and community members, an education curriculum for HIV cure research through the arts; and
• being inducted into the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, one of the highest honours for a Canadian academic.

A Zoom awards ceremony was held to honour Pauline and the other award winners, hosted by the OAEA Awards Committee.

Congratulations, Pauline!