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On his first day teaching at the º£½ÇÉçÇø Faculty of Law, Jason Kully, ’12 JD looked out at his online classroom and was greeted by 30 black screens. Only seven students had turned their cameras on for the class, which had been moved online due to the pandemic.

“At one point, I sent students into breakout rooms and eight never came back,” laughs Kully, a partner at Field Law.

This wasn’t what Kully had expected when he’d signed up to teach LAW 507: Canadian Human Rights Law. He’d taken over the course at the suggestion of a colleague who had taught it for years, and it was his first foray into teaching.

“I hadn’t done any teaching, but a lot of my work as a lawyer involves presentations, training, and helping people understand legal concepts,” he says. “That gave me a foundation, but teaching students was something new.”

After the trial-by-fire pandemic teaching experience, Kully found his stride. Four years later, he has been named the 2025 recipient of the Pringle/Royal Sessional Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes outstanding teaching by part-time instructors.

From student to teacher

When the faculty returned to in-person learning, Kully found himself standing at the front of lecture halls where he had once attended classes as a law student.

One of his favourites was a human rights course with the much-lauded Pat Paradis ’88 LLB, who earned multiple teaching awards during her 23 years of sessional instruction.

“She was a great professor and set me on a really good path,” he recalls. “It made a big difference to learn from practitioners who showed us how the law actually worked in practice.”

Kully approaches teaching in a similar spirit, not shying away from the challenges of working in human rights law. Students learn that they are more likely to represent employer organizations than complainants, and that the legal landscape can shift drastically in response to the socio-political climate. In the case of the latter, Kully draws on recent debates, such as adding vaccination status asand the backlash against gender minority protections.

“It’s been interesting to be able to teach at the same time as these discussions are happening and talk to students about these developments, which show that the human rights principles we may take for granted can be attacked or used in different ways by different people,” he says.

He also provides students with opportunities to do tasks they’ll encounter in actual practice, such as drafting human rights complaints and client opinions. “When they leave my class, I want them to recognize the forms, know what goes in them, and feel confident handling them,” he says.

On recognition

Now in his fifth year of teaching, Kully says he enjoys watching his students’ academic growth and career development, and hopes to inspire some of them to pursue a career in human rights law. He was pleasantly surprised to learn he was the recipient of a teaching award.

“I don’t teach for the accolades,” he says. “But it’s nice to know I’m having the same kind of impact on students that my instructors had on me when I was in law school.”