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Spotlighting Mentorship Approaches at Laurier
Originally published November 21, 2025
Conversation Series with Maryam Khan: Any Interaction Can be Life-Changing
Maryam Khan from Laurier’s Faculty of Social Work, and recipient of the 2025 Faculty Mentoring Award, brings authenticity, care, community, and courage into every aspect of their teaching and mentorship. Maryam builds classroom and mentoring relationships rooted in trust and accountability where students take ownership of their learning and engage in critical conversations. This approach includes co-creating community guidelines where students are invited to consider how they want to interact with one another and what the community looks like, so everyone can hold the learning space together.
Maryam shares advice for creating peer mentoring communities for students that help reduce isolation, loneliness and build networks that carry on into professional practice. Mentorship, for Maryam, is enriched with relationship-building outside of classrooms and in-person, normalizing making mistakes, and approaching questions together as a community.
In “bringing people together in good ways,” Maryam models how educators can teach with authenticity, invite growth through dialogue, and sustain lifelong communities of learning and support. Watch the episode >>
Explore more episodes featuring award-winning faculty and listen to this episode on the Laurier Teaching Podcast!
Spotlighting Mentorship Approaches at Laurier
Laurier instructors continue to show us that good mentorship means shifting away from traditional understandings of mentors as “advice givers” and instead moving toward making connections that prioritize human relationships (Wisdom 2025). Previous Faculty Mentoring Award recipients share experiences and ideas that form the basis of their mentorship approach that champions student success. Watch their conversation series episodes to learn more about their work:
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On Beginning: “Starting where they are. But it's also collaboratively developing that plan. So what is it we need? Where are their strengths? What do they feel comfortable with. Where are their learning edges? What are some of those remedial things, some of those additional things.”
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Michael Woodford, 2024 – Mentoring Students to be Change Agents
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On Feedback: “When I remind them that red [pen] means love, it means that I cared enough actually to read your stuff and to read your work. And it takes a lot of time to put in all the red.”
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Danielle Law, 2023 – Leading with Care
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On Personalizing: “Be your authentic self and bring forward who you are as people and what you find important.”
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Paula Fletcher, 2022 – Mentoring Students for Broad Possibilities
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On Inspiration: “One habit to instill in students: to wonder. To be curious. To question the questions. To have an insatiable desire to know.”
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Meena Sharify-Funk, 2021 - Mentoring with Grace
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Supporting Graduate Student Development Through the ASPIRE Program
TEI supports graduate student teaching development through ASPIRE's Professional Development Certificate, which provides Master’s, Doctoral and Graduate diploma students with skills, knowledge, and resources to succeed in their academic journeys and beyond.
Each year, TEI mentors two new student teaching developers to facilitate ASPIRE Graduate Teaching Development workshops. This year, our team welcomes Inderjit Saini, from the MA in Communication Studies program, who previously earned a BA in Communication Studies here at Laurier, and Savannah Lesperance from the BEd program, who previously earned an M.Sc. in animal nutrition from the University of Guelph. Both Inderjit and Savannah have shown remarkable facilitation and mentoring skills, and we are excited for them to support TEI’s graduate student teaching development with ASPIRE!