1999 - Dr. Sylvia Hale

Department of Sociology
BSc (Bath), MA (York), PhD (UBC)

Dr. Sylvia Hale has been a member of the St. Thomas faculty since 1975 and is highly recognized by both students and colleagues for her hard work and accomplishments. Dr. Hale has published three books: two editions of her Introduction to Sociology text book, Controversies in Sociology, as well as The Elusive Promise and Decision Processes in Rural Development in India.

Dr. Hale sees teaching as the central interest of her professional career both in her work with students and her current research interests. A pioneer in teaching, Dr. Hale's Controversies in Sociology text strays from the customary fact-based texts to an argument that facts as we see them are always socially constructed. One of Dr. Hale's central objectives in teaching is to "ensure that our best students will feel themselves intellectually challenged, and stretched to think critically, and to question the taken-for-granted understandings of the social world while at the same time, trying to encourage and support the weaker students so that they can gain some feel for different theoretical perspectives."

In order to understand Dr. Hale's teaching style, it is essential to know her work ethic; she is a rigorous scholar with thorough research habits. Dr. Hale expanded on her vision of teaching in an article published in Teaching Sociology, a reputable journal of the American Sociology Association. In this article Dr. Hale states "Every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". It is with this principle that Dr. Hale leads her students on the road of education, teaching them, both through class material and by example, to question the status quo and to analyse critically societal issues.