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Ron Joyce Centre for Business Studies Associate Professor Dr. Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers is the recipient of the 2026 Herbert and Leota Tucker Teaching Award, the highest teaching honour at the University. 

Cross-appointed between Commerce and Feminist & Gender Studies, Pascoe-Deslauriers' work explores how systems of power and inequality shape workplaces and communities. With a background that combines equity studies and management, she brings an interdisciplinary approach that situates business studies within the broader liberal arts and sciences education.  

“To be amongst the high-quality past recipients and to be recognized for the things that I am contributing, I’m deeply humbled by that,” she says. “It inspires me to keep innovating and building trust-based relationships with students in order to create community and industry-partnered experiential learning for them as well.”  

Pascoe-Deslauriers' teaching philosophy is to share her own joy of discovery and learning with her students while creating opportunities for applied learning that centres equity and social justice. Her approach promotes a comprehension exploration of business and management issues within their social and economic contexts.  

As a scholar of work and employment, her research focuses on how organizational and human resource practices intersect with broader social policy and the competitive forces that shape job quality. She examines how these practices are influenced by wider social, economic, and political contexts, and brings that perspective directly into the classroom — encouraging students to engage with real-world complexity and uncertainty. 

“I am very interested in how to design good quality, high engagement work where individuals have a stake in what is being done,” she says. “I draw on my understanding of how to design good jobs and I apply that in the classroom.” 

Pascoe-Deslauriers is committed to experiential learning, working closely with community partners to give students hands-on opportunities to build real-world skills.  

In her classes, students take on projects within the University and beyond, working through real-world challenges that don’t have easy answers. From evaluating jobs on campus to developing inclusive HR practices or collaborating with global organizations, students gain experience applying their knowledge in effective ways. 

“For me, one of the key parts of experiential learning is not that it just happens organically,” she says. “It happens by building trust and mutual collaboration with the students and partners so that they can feel like they can take a chance and do something that is new to them.  That increases their  stake in the projects.” 

Her goal is to equip students with the tools to navigate an increasingly complex world — developing a deeper understanding of how their choices, and the choices of others, can shape outcomes and how they might approach those decisions more thoughtfully. 

“I often tell students that I don't necessarily have a set of answers for them or a way of doing it. But what I hope that they will take out of the class is being able to ask good questions,” she says. “Being able to ask questions about not only who bears the cost, but how systems actually work, what we may be able to do differently. And through that process of inquiry — that we academics are so inclined towards anyway — the students will find ways to bring that creative inquiry and more critical thinking and lateral thinking into the workplaces that they go on to contribute to.” 

Pascoe-Deslauriers will receive the Tucker Teaching Award at the Morning Convocation for Science, Commerce, and Arts and Science (Health Studies) Graduates on May 11.