Gary Poole
Associate Professor
Gary Poole
Biographical note
Associate Professor Poole is a member of the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia. He teaches in the undergraduate medical program, primarily in Doctor, Patient and Society. His research interests include a study of attitudes toward full-body CT scan screening, the psychological effects of high-tech medical procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging and mammography, and factors that affect people's ability to cope with cancer. He is the principal author of The Psychology of Health and Health Care: A Canadian Perspective.
Associate Professor Poole is also the Director of the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth and the Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at UBC. Gary has won a 3M Teaching Fellowship, which is a Canadian national teaching award, an Excellence in Teaching award from Simon Fraser University, and a Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal for contributions to Higher Education. Associate Professor Poole was the President of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from 2000 to 2004. He is the co-author of Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education.
In terms of medical education, Gary has implemented a self-directed project option for second-year medical students and is collecting data on the impact of providing such an educational opportunity.
Keynote presentation: A place to call a learning home
The saying home is where the heart is, applies well to someone's learning home. If our students are to see our institutions as their learning homes, then what can we do to ensure their hearts are here, that they feel a genuine sense of engagement and belonging? In this session, we will explore ways that architecture, real and virtual, can be used to create this sense of learning home. We will look at challenges provided by diverse beliefs about what learning is and, indeed, what home is. Examples of such learning homes will be drawn from the University of British Columbia's new Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and from other exciting projects found across Australia and the world.