Dr. Regan Lipes knows that every learner is different – but that everyone can learn from storytelling.

The 2024 Sessional Instructor Teaching Excellence Award recipient aims to keep her classrooms energetic and engaging, providing the best learning experience she can. To do this, she focuses on the diverse needs of her students, and on keeping her approach to teaching fresh.

Here, the sessional instructor in the Department of English discusses how she accomplishes all of that, and why she feels so connected to MacEwan.

What sparked your interest in teaching?

I think I always wanted to be a teacher. I liked the idea of being able to talk to people and learn new things – to create those communication links. When I was a kid, I probably wasn't able to articulate that, but I always enjoyed going to school, talking to my teachers, hearing their stories and learning through storytelling. I think that's why I'm a literature teacher. 

What brought you to MacEwan? 

We have a joke in my family that all roads lead to MacEwan. My husband went here many moons ago. He chose MacEwan because he saw the campus when he first immigrated to this country. When I graduated from U of A, my dream was to find a job in teaching. I got an email from the chair at the time here at MacEwan, and she offered me one class. I figured out quickly that I really love it here, and I wanted to stay. So I started asking for more things to do and getting more involved. When my oldest son was little, I'd come in on the weekend to do some marking, and he'd make little Lego cities and race his cars up and down the hallway when no one else was around. MacEwan is a very integral part of our family. Even my younger children get excited to see the towers from afar. They point, and announce: “It’s mommy’s work!” I think MacEwan just feels like home for all of us now. 

You focus on catering to students' needs. How do you manage that in a large, diverse class?

I'm a person with a disability. We have a lot of very capable students who have disabilities and can get left behind either because a well-intentioned instructor doesn't know how to address what they need, or because the student isn't yet able to advocate for themselves. 

There’s also a cultural factor. Often, students can feel isolated based on identity. This doesn't necessarily mean ethnic culture, it can also mean demographic culture or social culture. Students will group themselves together on the first day of class based on some way they identify with each other. That can be great socially, but it's not the greatest thing in terms of a literature class, because you want to hear different ideas and learn from each other. Finding ways to be culturally inclusive and dismantle those boundaries is a primary focus of mine. 

How do you take something like classic literature and make it relatable to modern students?

Take the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has so many modern manifestations – graphic novels, and it’s been integrated into role-playing video games. It does have this video game aspect to it, where you have a hero that's interacting with this environment, and there's a quest. That immediately clicks with a lot of gamers. Once you bring in modern examples, people are like, “Okay, now I'm seeing it.” I have this one slide that I use where Gilgamesh is depicted as a stone carving with a magnificent beard, and then evolves into action figures and anime-style figurines. Storytelling is so integral to how we communicate, how we exist as humans, build culture and build relationships, and so even with classical literature, it all comes full circle.

You say that you’re always learning – what made you focus on your own growth as both a learner and an educator?

No two learners are alike. The way I talk about the material, and the way I engage with the students, need to be different. In order to do that, I have to make sure that I'm not on autopilot. I'm constantly eliciting their feedback about how the literature resonates with them. I need to make sure that with every new group or cohort of students, everybody's getting something out of the experience. In order to do that, I need to keep learning, I need to keep refreshing the material, making it more alive, resuscitating it. I may have gotten my degrees and hung them on my wall, but that doesn't mean that I'm done. I do a lot with the Centre for Teaching and Learning. I love their seminars and I go to as many as possible. I'm always looking for new ways to reinvigorate the curriculum that I'm presenting. 

What did it mean to you to receive the Sessional Instructor Teaching Excellence Award?

When I got nominated, I was really excited,and I was even more surprised when I was chosen. We're really fortunate to have a lot of truly inspiring and talented instructors at MacEwan, and a lot of very seasoned sessionals. It was a really humbling experience. It was also one of these moments where I was totally knocked off my feet. To be recognized within this very large and very, very accomplished group of hard-working people who aren't necessarily always in the spotlight is really special and something I am immensely grateful for.