Each year, UBC Okanagan faculties award a student with the University of BC Medal for the Head of Graduating Class. This award is presented to the top student based on their academic performance throughout their program. In the Bachelor of Education (BEd) program, this award is provided to the student not only based on their academic performance, but also the individual that exemplifies being a scholar-practitioner.
The Okanagan School of Education is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient is Andrea Cotter.
For Andrea, the award represents 16 months of work, relationships, and the courage it took to start over at 41 in a room full of strangers.
“It’s incredibly validating,” she says. “I am so grateful for all the people I met and the experiences I had through the program. I fully embraced everything that was thrown at me, and gave it everything that I had. As one wise professor said on day one, ‘You get out what you put in,’ and I think I did just that. ”
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Andrea Cotter, BEd ’26, was at the start of her degree, when she heard a description, she first heard as a teenager. A relative was visiting her family and had talked about going back to school for a PhD. She heard him describe himself as a lifelong learner.
“As a teen, I remember thinking, what does that mean?” she says. “But when I heard it again at the start of the program, it just clicked — wow, that is me. I’ve always sought out any little learning opportunity I can.”
Teaching is her third career, though in many ways it feels like the one she was always moving toward. At ten years old, she told her parents she wanted to be a marine biologist and work at the Vancouver Aquarium. She followed through and spent nearly fifteen years at the aquarium. She loved it, and she thought she always would.
“I put my heart and soul into that place,” she says.
It wasn’t until the arrival of her son, Stuart, in 2020, during the pandemic, that her perspective shifted. By stepping away from the relentless pace of aquarium life — the overtime, the constant emails, the sense of never truly being off — she had an opportunity to reflect.
“Sometimes when you step away from something, you gain a lot of perspective that you don’t see when you’re in it,” she says.
Andrea with son Stuart
She decided to leave the aquarium, opened a home daycare in Squamish, and began assembling the pieces of what would come next. The signs, she says, had always been there. People had told her for years, that she should be a teacher, but she had always brushed it off.
After managing the daycare for a couple years, she once again became to reflect on what she wanted to do next. An essay she had written years earlier, when she applied to run with the Olympic Torch in 2010, about teaching people to care for the environment and the place they live, came to mind. The aquarium’s interpretive programs. The daycare. The piano students. It became clear that teaching was meant to be.
“I put all those pieces together and thought, this is the right path for me,” she says.
Getting into the UBC Okanagan BEd program meant uprooting her life. Andrea and her then four-year-old son moved to West Kelowna with her parents, leaving her husband behind in Squamish. She didn’t know anyone in the Okanagan. On her first day, she found herself having a challenging time relating to the peers at her table — none of them were parents and she was nearly two decades older.
But the connections came quickly, she met Darcy and Sam to form what she affectionately calls the marigolds. The three of them, she says, took reflection seriously and would bounce ideas off each other, challenge each other, show up for each other through the hard days.
“We just fully enveloped ourselves in this program and dove deep into everything,” she says. “I can’t even really put it into words.”
Throughout the program, she dove into the coursework, the practicums, and built a community of people around her. Outside of the classroom, the busyness didn’t stop as there were lunches to make, bedtimes to manage, and a little boy to show up for.
“It was hard at times, but I think it also made our relationship so much better because he saw that, like, my mom does something, and I want to be like my mom.”
Last fall, Andrea presented on what it means to be a scholar-practitioner — also referred to as a student of lifelong learning — to the new teacher candidates. For her, it means taking the theory, finding the parts you truly believe in, and not getting lost in content delivery.
“Are you just the deliverer of the content, or are you the facilitator of knowledge?” she says. “Throughout my journey in the program, I learned that being a teacher isn’t about having answers. It is more about asking questions, remaining curious, and adapting. It requires modelling for your students the type of student you want them to be, someone who regularly reflects on their experiences and uses the knowledge and research they acquire to make good decisions. Being a scholar-practitioner means you approach teaching as an ongoing inquiry and a constant process of reflection to improve. The most meaningful growth happens when we learn alongside others and remain open. Even as educators, we are never finished learning.”
Her advice to future teacher candidates is to give the program everything you have, because the experience is the point.
“Embrace the whole process,” she says. “You’re going to meet so many cool people. Really lean into your professors and advisors because they only want to help you succeed. And just have fun, you won’t regret all the work that you put in. For me, the program was transformative in more ways than one. The program exposed who I truly was and reset my path in life.”
Dr. Derek Gladwin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC Vancouver, where he teaches in the Department of Language and Literacy Education and is a Faculty Associate in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. He co-founded UBC’s 
Dr. Kedrick James is currently Director of the UBC Okanagan School of Education and a Professor of Teaching in Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education at UBC Vancouver. His diverse background, including roles in education, digital literacy and language studies, the arts and ecology, informs his interdisciplinary approach to scholarly research, teaching and service. Formerly director of the Digital Literacy Centre at UBC, he created public place- and arts-based educational technologies.
March Hutchinson, BEd ’26, had a childhood filled with creative and outdoor experiences. Those opportunities developed her sense of confidence, freedom and possibility. Today, she continues those same experiences as an artist, mother, gardener, hiker, forager and lake lounger; but it’s her passion for art that she’s been able to carry forward into her work as a visual arts teacher.
