Professor Gillian Calder Receives Harry Hickman Alumni Award

For more than two decades, Professor Gillian Calder has worked to shape how law is taught at UVic. One of Canada’s leading voices on legal pedagogy, Calder’s work responding to diverse learning styles invites students to deepen their understanding of the law through experiential and embodied learning. Her exemplary work in teaching, mentorship and curriculum development has now been recognized with the Harry Hickman Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching and Educational Leadership, UVic’s top teaching honour.

Finding practical ways to help law students learn has always been a priority for Calder. Through student-centered teaching, her pedagogy focuses on active learning where exercises, discussions and problem-solving activities animate the law school classroom. Developing methods that focus on lived experience and highlight issues like marginalization, oppression and social context, Calder’s methods engage students while helping to foster new cohorts of ethical practitioners into the legal profession. 

 “Calder is a gifted, inspired, and innovative teacher who has demonstrated excellence in teaching and educational leadership within the faculty, the university, and across Canada,” says Freya Kodar, Dean of Law. “She continually works to ensure her pedagogy responds to students’ diverse learning styles and helps build the skills they will need in legal practice, whatever form that takes.”

Calder’s innovative teaching exercises have instilled lessons that students return to long after graduation. 

“I graduated over 15 years ago and I still remember the impression these activities had on me. I absorbed the course material much more than I would have by just reading about it,” says UVic Law graduate Jessica Derynck of her time in Calder’s classroom. “Gillian's teaching went beyond information and analysis to opportunities to practice empathy for people with experiences very different from my own; this served me well as a lawyer and now as an adjudicator.”

Calder also spends significant time supporting students outside the classroom. She encourages them to publish their work, supervises research projects, and is a gleeful backer of student-led initiatives.

 “Gillian made space for everyone, whether they belonged or not, until at last they did,” says law alumni and BC Supreme Court Justice Alison Latimer. “She taught me many concrete areas of law, but the lesson I took forward into my own practice in the years that followed was about the value of mentorship.”

In addition to teaching, Calder has been actively involved in the student-side of administration; having spent 5 years as an Associate Dean, a year as the Chair of Gender Studies, as well as hands-on work in the development and implementation of UVic Law’s groundbreaking the Juris Doctor & Juris Indigenarum Doctor (JD/JID) program.

Described as a constant, compassionate, and visionary educator, Calder’s research continues to focus on how law is taught. She has published widely and is working on a book, Creativity in Legal Education: Ethics, Empathy and Imagination, which looks at how teaching methods can help students become thoughtful and responsible legal professionals.

“It is humbling to be recognized for work you love, particularly in a place so dedicated to innovative teaching,” says Calder. “So grateful to a generation of law students who have given me their trust.”