The Dean of Arts Teaching Awards are presented annually to Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) Faculty of Arts instructors in recognition of outstanding and innovative teaching practices that consistently encourage student success and academic achievement.
English instructor Betty Anne Buirs is one of the award winners this year. For Buirs the award crowns a 30-year career teaching at KPU that will be wrapping up at the end of August thanks to a well-earned early retirement.
“It was a pleasure to present this award to Betty Anne Buirs and honour her hard work, welcoming spirit, and willingness to go above and beyond for students and faculty alike,” says Dr. Shelley Boyd, dean of the Faculty of Arts.
“Betty Anne has been a pillar of the KPU community for the last three decades and the impact she’s had has been tremendous. On a personal level, I’d like to note that when I first began as a faculty member in the English department, Betty Anne helped with my onboarding and was such a kind and helpful presence. She is truly a model of generosity, compassion, and collegiality.”
“Working in the trenches of first year, I was deeply surprised,” says Buirs of her nomination. The nominations from faculty highlighted Buirs’ unwavering work ethic and commitment to the success of her students.
Part of her commitment can be seen in the Kwantlen Virtual Writing website, which Buirs developed in 2004. This free resource is specifically for first-year students and is full of useful instructions and exercises. Even in the final weeks of her KPU tenure, Buirs is hard at work updating the Virtual Writing site to include new handouts, videos, and interactive content as her “final legacy for the website.”
Nominations from students highlight Buirs’ infectious passion, engaging classroom environment, and encouraging presence. Her commitment to fostering student success was born from her own experience as a KPU student.
“I knew I wanted to return to Kwantlen because my instructors had modelled exactly the kind of student-centred teaching that I wanted to do.” Buirs graduated from KPU (then Douglas) in 1981 with an arts diploma. She then went on to earn a bachelors and masters from the University of British Columbia, and her PhD from the University of Saskatchewan.
Buirs began her instructing career at KPU in 1993. “What I didn’t realize until I began working here myself was how rewarding it would be to share that goal with others and to be given free rein to endlessly, or as some would say, obsessively, experiment with new teaching methods.”
Buirs’ colleagues describe her as the heart and soul of the English department. She has served as chair and a driving force in KPU’s Professional Development & Orientation Committee and made sure her peers have access to mentoring, workshops, orientation materials, peer reviews, and the latest teaching materials.
“What I’ve loved most about teaching here is that my colleagues have become like a second family,” Buirs says. “If Kwantlen is the foundation of my academic success, then I owe any success I’ve found as a teacher to my amazing colleagues in the English department—because, in truth, I’ve stolen at least half of my stuff from them.”