Associate Professor Angus McIntosh (Biological Sciences) was one of 10 teachers awarded a Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award during a ceremony held at Parliament in June 2007.
Professor McIntosh said he was "a bit overwhelmed" by the award, which included $20,000 in prize money to be used for career development and promote best practice. "Teaching is your core business as an academic so I feel like I've just been doing my job.
"It's nice to be acknowledged and recognised for something that I enjoy doing. Teaching is the main reason why I work at a university rather than in a research facility. The students present a great challenge but also great inspiration and teaching them is enormously rewarding. I can't think of a better job."
Professor McIntosh believed his role as a teacher was to inspire students and provide them with the tools to seek knowledge independently. "One of my philosophies is that we should be concentrating on depth of knowledge rather than breadth of knowledge. We should be providing students with basic, fundamental knowledge so they can go out and seek further information on their own."
However, while Professor McIntosh believed teaching was an "absolutely fundamental" part of being an academic, he said teaching and research were inseparable.
"I think my research informs my teaching. The fact that I’m generating information helps in my teaching and makes it up to date," he said. "Teaching also focuses the mind on what the important questions are and what you should be addressing in your research. A large proportion of good research ideas come from students and we wouldn’t be doing our jobs right if that wasn’t the case. We should be inspiring them to think creatively."
