Excellence in Nursing Education (TENURED) – Nancy Moules (University of Calgary)

Award Winner #1Dr Moules has brought her love of working with children who suffer from cancer and their families to her role as an educator. Through her gentle and inquisitive approach, she learns from, and works with these vulnerable people through the most horrifying of journeys. Her hermeneutic work has led to: (1) better enabling health care providers to engage in relational practices with families; (2) identifying how grief can open therapeutic conversations with families; and (3) ‘discovery’ of the journey of grandparents through their children’s and grandchildren’s experience with cancer. Her students, as well as clinicians In the health care setting and beyond, benefit greatly from her expansive knowledge of the field and her teaching ingenuity as she ties the seemingly abstract theoretical notions associated with hermeneutic phenomenology with ‘real world’ experiences and practice In children’s cancer care. Nancy has been the recipient of three University of Calgary Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Awards and has thus been honoured with the Hall of Fame Teaching Excellence Award. This is moving testimony to how her students value her as an educator. She is a leading educator and mentor in hermeneutic research. She was instrumental in founding the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute and has established Canada’s first journal that will provide an opportunity for students and researchers to take an ‘applied’ approach to hermeneutics. Always a mentor, her students are very much involved in these endeavours: as participants and presenters at annual Canadian Hermeneutic Institute meetings, editorial assistants and reviewers for this new on-line journal.