Team teaching duo win award for humour and heart

Learn more about the Master of Arts in Disaster and Emergency Management.

Doing disaster differently

In a disaster, not everyone feels the impacts equally. While winds blow and rivers rise in indifference to how humans act and react, differences in wealth and race, in ability, mobility and sexual identity can affect who is hurt or how they’re helped.

In the online and in-person classrooms they share as part of Royal Roads University’s Master of Arts in Disaster and Emergency Management program, Assoc. Fac. Members Michelle Hamilton-Page and Patricia Ann Stukes work to help their students — learners from various professions, cities and even countries — understand the difference those differences can make.

For their efforts to assist students to think beyond the engineering and other common technical challenges associated with disasters, Hamilton-Page and Stukes are the recipients of the 2025 Kelly Outstanding Teaching Awards for Team Teaching.

Lessons from Katrina

The teaching duo uses Hurricane Katrina, which, 20 years ago, devastated Stukes’ former hometown of New Orleans, as the focus of study. 

“There's the ideal that we live in a society that says it's a meritocracy, right? So the people who work the hardest are the ones who are going to be as successful and get all the resources that they need,” says Stukes.

“However, there are people who work two and three jobs, more than 60 hours a week, who have the bare minimum, and thus are alienated and are ostracized during disasters because some people have chosen to frame disaster assistance as some kind of welfare program where folks are just lazy.”

Stukes also notes the fears, for instance, of 2S:GBTQQ+ people seeking disaster aid who might be reluctant to get it from religious organizations that may have taken anti-trans or anti-gay stances, and asks, “How much would they have to change in order to feel OK?”

Tackling tough topics together

The Kelly Awards selection committee said it was impressed with the teaching team’s ability to guide discussions on difficult and emotional topics while highlighting intersectionality and multiple perspectives — all while balancing humour and vulnerability, and demonstrating an obvious joy of working together.

“I think one of the things that resonated [in the award nomination] is that they talked about the care between the two of us and in our deep concern and care for students,” Hamilton-Page says.

“There's nothing I do in my career that's more satisfying,” she adds. “It is a very different thing to teach with someone who challenges me in a way that I welcome and that I'm so open to that that really does ask me to be the best thinker, practitioner, scholar that I could possibly be.

“We absolutely are in it to learn, to learn with a cohort and constantly constructing knowledge and meaning, and being challenged.”

About the Kelly Awards

The Kelly Outstanding Teaching Awards recognize core and associate faculty members and Continuing Studies facilitators who are representative of outstanding teaching at Royal Roads. They were created in recognition of Dr. Gerald O. Kelly, RRU’s first installed president, and honour teachers who promote the university’s learner-centred philosophy while making positive contributions to teaching excellence.

The Kelly Outstanding Teaching Awards are open to all Royal Roads University faculty members who are actively engaged in teaching for-credit or non-credit courses at RRU. A call for nominations is sent out each spring to faculty, staff, and students. Learn more about the awards and see past recipients.

Learn more about the Master of Arts in Disaster and Emergency Management.