91��ܽ

91��ܽ’s Department of English celebrated the retirement of Dr. Nicky Didicher with a teaching colloquium at the end of September. Professor Stephen Collis reflects on her career with the department below:

After 23 years at SFU, Dr. Nicky Didicher has retired. As a member of our teaching faculty, Nicky’s contributions have been the veritable backbone of the department’s curriculum: the range of courses she taught, from 18^th-century British literature to contemporary climate fiction and children’s literature (not to mention the sheer number of students who studied with her) was remarkable. The fact that she put so much into her teaching—dressing in period costume, bringing visiting speakers into her classroom, having her students publish their legitimately scholarly term projects, and pouring her heart and soul into her course designs—will not be forgotten by her students or her colleagues. Her care for student engagement, and her pedagogical innovations will also long be remembered. Nicky championed creative projects in her academic classes, student-centred “ungrading,” and she created the department’s only “quantitative” literature class: Metrics and Prosody (where you needed at least all ten fingers and a rhymical sense of mathematics).

Professor Ronda Arab writes:

Nicky was my first stop whenever I had questions about pretty much anything—from Canvas functions to dealing with classroom problems to how the department handled a particular issue 20 years ago. Nicky was always there when I needed someone to listen to a long, convoluted explanation about how a plagiarising student had been torturing me with weeks of lies and what I was going to do about it. Nicky gave very good advice, and it will feel very strange not to have her across the hall.