Each year, the University of Washington honors faculty, staff, teaching assistants, and programs for exceptional dedication and innovation. Arts and Sciences recipients of these awards are profiled below. These stories are excerpted from the University Week Awards Supplement.
Kudos
for A&S's Top Teachers:
Barry Witham; David Domke;
James Green; Priti Ramamurthy
Linguistics
Teaching Assistant Honored
Hecker
Selected for Distinguished Staff Award
Daniel
Honored for Mentoring Efforts
Dance Program Soars with Brotman Award
Listing
of Additional A&S Awards and Honors
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| UW Distinguished Teaching Award recipients (from left) David Domke, Barry Witham, Priti Ramamurthy, and James Green. Photo by Karen Orders. |
The UW Distinguished Teaching Award, awarded by the UW Alumni Association, honors faculty who show a mastery of their subject matter, intellectual rigor, lively curiosity, a commitment to research, and a passion for teaching. Four Arts and Sciences faculty, profiled below, are among the recipients for 2002.
Barry Witham, Professor of Drama
Barry Witham might have been a lawyer. After he’d earned his bachelor’s
degree in English, he applied to Columbia University School of Law and
was accepted. “But my heart really wasn’t in it,” Witham says.
Instead he entered the master’s program in theater at the University of Iowa. But then marriage and family intervened, and he decided he needed a more permanent income.
Soon Witham took a job at a tiny college in Illinois, where he did everything. “I coached the debate team, I supervised the radio station. I directed and designed the plays. I taught public speaking, phonetics, drama,” he says. “That’s where I fell in love with teaching.”
Teaching, says Witham, involves storytelling. “People remember stories,” he says. “I try to tell stories that illuminate what we’re reading or that draw parallels between what we’re reading and things that are happening. What interests me as a historian is the way a play participates in the society that it’s a part of.”
In class, he teases this information out of his students “as if the Socratic method were a thing of nature, like plants and rivers and other unassailable facts, as if we had all gotten together in the same room to discuss books and artists in order to teach him a thing or two,” says Derek Davidson, a former student who now teaches at Ashland University. “He asks us, ‘help me with this.’ And we do with gratitude, knowing that he is our Clarence Oddbody, our angel who by letting us help him is helping us immeasurably.”
“The biggest thing I’ve learned about teaching,” Witham says, “is that my job is not to tell students what I think, but to try to help them understand what they think.”
His efforts have won him great popularity. Drama School Director Sarah Nash Gates reports that students, when asked which courses have benefited them the most, routinely answer “any class with Barry.”
David Domke, Assistant Professor of Communications
With “guest lecturers” like George Stephanopoulos and Jesse Ventura, how
could David Domke go wrong?
Well, actually he could and that’s the point. One of the riskier teaching techniques Domke regularly uses is to become the Clinton administration aide-turned-journalist on one day and the Minnesota governor on another.
He prefaces the Stephanopoulos “guest appearance” with a series of lectures about how political elites influence the press—a subject Stephanopoulos is uniquely qualified to tackle. Ventura’s appearance fits in with curriculum about the Internet’s role as a communication medium.
Neither of these lectures is done with whimsy. They are, Domke says, relevant and valuable parts of his American Press and Politics class. He’s found the forays into acting to be among his most effective teaching methods. Students become caught up in the narrative and, as a result, often remember the lectures more than most and appreciate the fact he tried something different, Domke says.
Another unorthodox approach that has worked is “Stump the Professor”—a classroom game in which a student poses a question to Domke, who has 90 seconds to answer. Then the student gives her prepared answer, which can be bolstered by other students. Domke says he likes what this approach does to the traditional teacher-student relationship and how it gets students actively engaged. “It allows the students to be the experts,” he says.
His methods seem to be working. In letters supporting Domke for the award, one student calls him the “best teacher I’ve ever had;” another claims “there is no professor that deserves this award more than [he] does.”
Frederick Campbell, the dean emeritus of undergraduate education, has also noted how quickly and profoundly Domke made an impact at the UW. “Professor Domke joined the School of Communications faculty in Autumn Quarter 1998,” says Campbell, “and since that time has established a record of teaching excellence that will be regarded as a benchmark for assistant professors in our school for many years to come.”
James Green, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology
It is not hyperbole to say that some students are dying to get into one
of the anthropology classes Jim Green teaches.
It doesn’t matter if the class is Anthro 100, the introductory course that draws hundreds of students every quarter; Anthro 322, his course on comparative death that attracts a turn-away enrollment each time it is offered; or Anthro 599, a required class that all anthropology teaching assistants must take before they are allowed to teach.
“What strikes me most about Jim is how much he truly loves what he does,” says Miriam Kahn, anthropology chair. “He always talks about how much fun it is to teach, and he always is the first to volunteer for anything teaching-related that I ask of the faculty.”
Green has always made teaching the focus of his UW career, now covering nearly three decades. “I try to be approachable, and I am interested in students’ intellectual growth and maturity,” he says. “In Anthropology 100, I try to teach anthropology as less than a grand truth but rather as a useful way to think about their lives. I want to give students a set of tools relevant to their concerns.”
Green says he looks at each classroom lesson as telling a story, a technique he learned from other faculty and TAs. “It has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he says. “And somewhere in it I want students to react and respond. I might ask a provocative question and have students talk to each other and then integrate their responses into the rest of the class.”
For example, during an exploration of marriage patterns in different cultures he might ask students to assume they live in a culture that permits having a second spouse, then ask them to consider what they would look for in a second spouse, how they would smooth it over with their first spouse, and have a class dialog on the topic.
“By doing it this way the topic is not just abstract,” he says. “It engages students so they are not just taking notes. People need to articulate these kinds of ideas for them to jell in their brains.”
Green is perhaps best known for his Comparative Study of Death class, offered once a year. “A lot of student have compelling reasons to be in the class,” says Green. “It draws widows under age 30, people who have had a sibling commit suicide, witnesses to violence in the Third World, people who are dealing with a parent’s or grandparent’s death, and some elderly students. There are not a lot of places in our culture to talk about death.”
Green wants students in the death class and his other classes to come away with a critical sensibility of what goes on in the rest of their lives. “I want them to have learned something that is applicable to their lives or to the lives of their significant other, not just exotic information.” he says. “I want them to know why life in the U.S. is the way it is, and to have the capacity to understand other cultures.”
Priti Ramamurthy, Assistant Professor of
Women Studies
Priti Ramamurthy studies gender and agricultural change in south India.
Her research focuses on feminist commodity chains, a methodology she has
pioneered. Her central concern is the relationships of gender, nationality,
and race to socioeconomic inequality and international development.
She is an outstanding teacher, says Women Studies Chair Judith Howard, because—among other things—she leads students to question their deeply held assumptions about these subjects. “Crucial to these contributions is Professor Ramamurthy’s gentle insistence that our primarily western students consider a global, transnational perspective on the issues they take up,” Howard says.
Ramamurthy could be in an economics or business department, with her bachelor’s degree in economics, master’s degrees in business administration and regional planning, and career experience in marketing and economic development. She chose women studies at the UW because of the department’s intellectual commitment to international feminism and interdisciplinary collaboration, and its emphasis on the links between theory and practice.
“Due to her commitment and support,” says recent graduate Yaffa Truelove, “I am now traveling to India to work with an organization focusing on women and development. I strongly feel that the depth, intensity, and engagement of her teaching has provided me with the necessary analytical skills and resources for me to successfully engage in my current endeavor abroad.”
“Ramamurthy is inventive,” says Tani Barlow, professor of women studies. “I am familiar with the material on her syllabus, and I can tell you it is hard to teach, because it is dry."
Barlow admires the currency of Ramamurthy’s syllabi with space built in to accommodate new material as issues change. And her mix of intellect, ethics, and service activism is truly rare in the academy, Barlow says.
“There is a lot of talk and not much action among faculty on this topic,” says Barlow. “Every year Ramamurthy goes to India and does the field work that informs her teaching and her research. Priti Ramamurthy models how it is truly possible to be an intellectual and an activist and a principled human being all at the same time.”
Linguistics Teaching Assistant Honored
Spend five minutes with Chia-Hui Huang, teaching assistant in the Department of Linguistics, and it’s apparent why she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. Her enthusiasm is contagious and enveloping. And in no time the doctoral student will try to convince you to take a course in linguistics.
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| Chia-Hui Huang. Photo by Kathy Sauber. |
“Linguistics rocks,” she says with the conviction of a prophet. “Linguistics is fun, exciting, and can help you understand and be appreciative of your own language.”
Language always has been big part of Huang’s life. Born in Taiwan, her native languages are Taiwanese and Mandarin. At age 10 she moved to Buenos Aires, where she learned Spanish. Then she moved to suburban Los Angeles where she mastered English while going to high school. At the University of Iowa she studied French literature and Spanish linguistics.
Huang found her first linguistics course “so hard and so challenging that I took more classes,” she says. She had found her field, and afterwards, at the UW, she found her calling—teaching.
“In a group of TAs who are outstanding instructors, Chia-Hui distinguishes herself both by her knowledge of the subject matter and her amazing facility in the classroom,” says Julia Herschensohn, chair of the Linguistics Department. “She does not rest on her laurels but continues to seek ways to improve her teaching.”
Huang has become the lead TA for the Linguistics Department and has taught a section of the introductory Linguistics 200 class, as well as four more advanced courses. Students find it difficult to avoid that fabulous enthusiasm she brings into the classroom.
“I learn so much from students,” says Huang. “They ask questions that never occurred to me. It reminds me on a daily basis why I’m a linguist. I enjoy seeing the lightbulb coming on in my students’ minds, and I can feel the energy emanating from them. That’s the best part of teaching, what really matters.”
Hecker Selected for Distinguished Staff Award
Felicia Hecker remembers clearly waking up to her clock radio the morning of September 11 and hearing what she thought must have been a movie trailer. “They were saying something about airplanes flying into the twin trade towers in New York,” recalls Hecker, associate director of the Middle East Center in the Jackson School of International Studies. “I thought it was a promo for some ridiculous movie.”
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| Felicia Hecker. Photo by Kathy Sauber. |
But as she listened, Hecker quickly realized it wasn’t a Hollywood fabrication.
Thus began one of the most challenging periods of Hecker’s nearly 30-year tenure with the Jackson School, as she and the Middle East Center attempted to navigate the aftermath of September 11, educating the Pacific Northwest and the nation about Islam and the Middle East.
In the following months, Hecker would field thousands of calls and emails, work to make the UW’s scholars available to the news media, and put together an Open Classroom lecture series that attracted the largest audiences in the University’s history for public lectures on campus—all in addition to her regular duties.
Her performance during the crisis, and over her long UW career, has earned her a Distinguished Staff Award.
Ellis Goldberg, professor of political science and director of the Middle East Center, called Hecker’s contributions even before the September attacks “superlative.” In 1999, she wrote the history of the Jackson School. In 2000, she wrote the grant proposal that ensured the continued existence of the center, and the past two summers she has organized the Jackson School’s Summer Seminar for teachers.
But it was her willingness to “assume extraordinary responsibilities in crisis” that underlined the extent of her commitment to the University. The attacks occurred while the UW was on break, and many of the faculty associated with the center, including the director at the time, were out of town.
“Ms. Hecker independently conceived the Open Classroom project to ensure that the University responded appropriately to the desire of the general public for information about the causes and consequences of the attack,” Goldberg said. “Some 15,000 people attended the series of seven talks, and hundreds of thousands of people have seen the talks on television, downloaded them from the Jackson School Web site, or read accounts of them in the print media.”
Daniel Honored for Mentoring Efforts
As mentors go, Tom Daniel might argue that he doesn’t do much. Never mind that he was named the UW’s Distinguished Graduate Mentor for 2002.
“Your students inevitably come up with things you wish you had come up with. I’d like to say you guide their research. The reality is they guide you,” says Daniel, the Joan and Richard Komen professor of zoology. “It’s easy to become a great graduate mentor if you have great and gifted graduate students.”
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| Tom Daniel. Photo by Kathy Sauber. |
It also helps to have enough discretionary money to support the work of graduate students in areas that might lie outside the scope of a traditional grant. That includes money that he donated from the stipend he received as a 1996 recipient of a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as funds from the Komen professorship.
Daniel sees himself as, essentially, a partner to the six graduate students and four undergraduates working in his laboratory. “The research machine at this university is a complete and utter partnership with graduate students,” he says. “We couldn’t do what we do without that brain power.”
Jordanna Henry, a zoology doctoral candidate, says, “Tom has been very open to my ideas for research. He has never been concerned with whether or not I would contribute to the lab’s designated research area. His main concern is that I am working on a project that suits my interests but is sufficiently in his area of expertise that he can advise me.”
Gregor Schuurman, also a zoology graduate student, adds, “I suspect that much of what Tom does for us goes unnoticed or is not sufficiently appreciated. Nevertheless, his example inspires me and reminds me that truly wonderful people can and do make a tremendous difference.”
But to Daniel, it’s always been the students who made the difference, and he feels they’ve made his life better.
“My first reaction was, ‘This is cheating. All I do is have a good time.’ It didn’t seem fair – it’s not like I have this Yoda-like wisdom. I just have fun with my students.”
Dance Program Soars with Brotman Award
When students enroll in a UW dance class, they often receive much more attention than they may have bargained for, says Elizabeth Cooper, director of the University’s Dance Program. Not only are they given academic and physical support, but strategic steps are also taken to test their limits.
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“Risk-taking is essential to the development of a dancer,” Cooper says. “By necessity, the faculty must build a safe, nurturing, and challenging environment in which students can make discoveries. We push our students but offer a place where no one is going to judge them unfairly and where we value each dancer.”
Creating such an atmosphere is one reason why Cooper believes the Dance Program was selected as one of this year’s winners of the Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence. Members of the award committee said they were impressed by the program’s “unique, high quality, elegant, and extremely efficient” method of providing a dance education.
Since becoming an academic department within the College in 1989, the Dance Program has grown dramatically. Dance performances have also gained public popularity—nearly 3,500 people have attended dance concerts so far this year, up from 800 in 1984-85.
The Dance Program provides intensely supportive instruction despite having only five full-time faculty. “Our studios are busy from 8:30 a.m. until late into the evening, seven days a week,” says Cooper.
Undergraduate Jessica Beck has been “blown away” by the faculty’s commitment and style. “There is a freedom to dance for the sake of dancing and creating art,” she wrote in an award recommendation letter.
Seven fully supported graduate students, all former professional dancers, help teach Dance Program courses, which range from dance composition and dance history to aesthetics and anatomy.
Cooper says the $17,500 award may be used to help establish a writing center, sponsor dance student association events, host visiting artists, and supplement the program’s costume budget.
Additional Awards, Honors, and Professorships
Roxana Augusztiny, who recently retired after 34 years as a Burke Museum employee, has been awarded the Washington Museum Association Award of Individual Excellence for her years at the Burke.
George Bertsch, professor of physics, has been named a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Bertsch’s work attempts to understand how elements are formed in supernova explosions.
Patricia Campbell, professor of music, has received the National Music Education Research Award, given to an individual whose record of publication demonstrates creativity, originality, and sustained productivity, and has a continuing influence on research in music education.
Conservation in Practice magazine, with Professor of Zoology Dee Boersma as executive editor, was awarded the Gold Award in magazine general excellence from the Society for National Association Publications.
Julianne Dalcanton, assistant professor of astronomy, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. She will use the fellowship to continue her work on galaxies, which she says “provide a valuable laboratory for exploring fundamental physics.”
Fred Fiedler, professor emeritus of psychology, has received the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP) 2002 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to the International Advancement of Applied Psychology.
Richard Gray, professor of Germanics, won a senior fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for the 2002-03 academic year.
Judith Howard, chair of women studies and professor of sociology, has completed a term as president of the Pacific Sociological Association.
Susan Jeffords, A&S divisional dean for the social sciences, has been named Katz Lecturer for 2002-2003 by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Jon Jory, professor of drama, was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Utah.
George Hiroaki Kakiuchi, professor emeritus of geography, has been selected to receive the Order of the Rising Sun, the highest civilian award given by Japan’s emperor, for his lifetime work in promoting relations between Japan and America.
Nancy Kenney, associate professor of women studies and psychology, has received the Model Service Learning Course Award from the UW’s Carlson Center.
Sandor Kovacs, assistant professor of mathematics, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. He will use the fellowship for a project in the field of geometry.
Margaret Levi, professor of political science and Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies, has been named a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.
Ronald Merrill, professor of earth and space sciences, has been awarded the Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union.
Marcel den Nijs, professor of physics, was elected a fellow in the American Physical Society.
Scott Noegel, associate professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, was awarded the 2002 City of Seattle Distinguished Citizen Medal for service in the arts.
Gerry Philipsen, professor of communication, has been selected to receive the Faculty Award for Distinguished Contributions to Lifelong Learning at the University of Washington, awarded by UW Educational Outreach.
John Rehr, professor of physics, was elected a fellow in the American Physical Society.
Geri Siks, professor emeritus of drama, won the National Mentors Award from the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America as “one of a quartet of national mentors of theatre for children, and theatre in education.”
Elizabeth Thompson, professor of statistics, has been named a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and promise for future accomplishment.
UW Career Week, held winter quarter, received a 2002 Outstanding Institutional Advising Program Award from the National Academic Advising Association. The event was planned by a steering committee that included numerous representatives from A&S departments.
Younan Xia, assistant professor of chemistry, has received the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for 2002, from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
Yu Yuan, assistant professor of mathematics, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. Yuan studies partial differential equations and differential geometry.
[Summer 2002 - Table of Contents]