Dr. Alexopoulos receiving her award, pictured with Dr. Diana Carter, FCCS Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies
The 2023-24 recipient of the FCCS Teaching Excellence and Innovation Award is Maria Alexopoulos. Dr. Alexopoulos received this award on the basis of students support and teaching evaluations. She teaches in the English and Cultural Studies programs, offering courses ranging from 1st year to masters level, such as “Cultural Studies 101,” “Adolescence in Media, Popular Culture, and Cultural Theory,” “Gender, Race and Medicine: The Construction of the Hysteric”, and “Methodologies: Critical Theory”.
This award is designed to recognize faculty members for teaching approaches that develop experiential learning, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, undergraduate research and scholarship.
Alexopoulos’ students note that she teaches in a way that they are motivated to learn and that she shows a genuine interest in supporting her students in her classes.
Alexopoulos says that in her courses students grapple with many complex and sensitive issues with topics that provoke complex emotions, resistances, and unpredictable classroom dynamics.
“Managing these dynamics within the classroom, being vigilant and attentive to individual student reactions, even when unvoiced, and meeting outside of class in order to unpack, process, clarify, and support students requires a great deal of time and sustained focus,” she says.
Her students have commented on the way her lesson plans and classroom design productively make space for important conversations in a way that is generative, respectful, and meaningful.
In 2022, Alexopoulos co-founded the UBCO Zine Fair, with Creative Writing and the support of the UBCO Library Special Collections. The UBCO Zine Fair has become a vibrant and popular annual event where students showcase and celebrate their final projects and chapbooks, offering an opportunity for students to engage with the work of their peers within their individual courses and across courses and disciplines. Example works from the zine projects are collected in the UBCO Special Collections, available to viewing for others on campus.
For the past two years, Alexopoulos has participated in the Feminist Horror Film Festival. The festival is designed to facilitate local public education and encourage efforts to combat gender-based discrimination and violence. In 2023, she was a co-organizer with the “Final Girls Berlin Film Festival” at Okanagan College and gave a public lecture accompanied by a film screening at UBC Okanagan. An in 2024, she offered a public lecture and facilitated a discussion at the Kelowna Public Library, entitled: Frontier Fear: Female Friendship as a Site of Horror in the Settler Colonial Imagination.
These events provided students with additional learning resources and demonstrated how instructors’ research and course concepts are applied in public contexts.
Dr. Alexopoulos in the classroom
UBCO Zine Fair 2023