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June 19, 2000

UCSC honors 13 instructors for excellence in teaching

Award-winners are nominated by their students

By Jim Burns

Each year, UC Santa Cruz's Academic Senate honors a number of the campus's most exemplary and inspiring teachers. Thirteen such professors and lecturers have been chosen this year for the 1999-2000 Excellence in Teaching Awards.

Excellence in Teaching Award winners: (l-r): Stephen Gliessman, Robert Kuhn, Linda Burman-Hall, Frank Bauerle, Geoffrey Dunn, Craig Haney, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, John Borrego, Barbara Rogoff, David Sweet, Daniel Wirls, and Justin Revenaugh (not pictured, Murray Baumgarten) (UCSC Photo Services)
The award winners were nominated by students for qualities such as their enthusiasm for teaching, commitment to learning, and the content of their courses.

The awards are sponsored by the senate's Committee on Teaching, which evaluated students' nomination letters, endorsement letters from department chairs, and statements on teaching from the nominees themselves in making the award determinations.

Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood and associate professor of linguistics Jaye Padgett, chair of the Committee on Teaching, presented the awards during a year-end ceremony at University House.

Each award winner received a framed certificate and a $500 honorarium.

This year's recipients follow; the wording on their certificates is included in the listing:

  • Lecturer Frank Bauerle, Mathematics: For seizing this opportunity to make a difference in students' lives, helping them slay the demons of math aversion while lifting them to the highest possible level of learning in a classroom characterized by structure, balance, and strong personal and academic support.

  • Professor Murray Baumgarten, Literature: For approaching the teaching of literature as a guided exploration, a fluid and ongoing dialogue among student, teacher, and text, wherein texts are the gateways to cultural worlds and students learn the arts of exegesis and interpretation.

  • Professor John Borrego, Community Studies: For taking the purpose of Community Studies to its full potential by exposing students firsthand to social issues and politics as they are lived and struggled with in the community and providing them an opportunity to do original research.

  • Professor Linda Burman-Hall, Music: For inspiring students to notice how music encodes a world of meaning as it comes from, hovers above, and returns to silence within a culture and for teaching multicultural perspectives that illuminate all forms of music while establishing connections and resonances among them.

  • Lecturer Geoffrey Dunn, Community Studies: For reaching out and building bridges to students as individuals through course content and an interactive pedagogy emphasizing discourse, engagement, and critical thinking, and for teaching diversity by modeling it through curricular choices.

  • Professor Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Anthropology: For emphasizing collaboration, understanding, high standards, and mastery while engaging students as partners in learning and offering them the tools to pursue knowledge on their own, confident of their intellectual and practical abilities.

  • Professor Stephen Gliessman, Environmental Studies: For a commitment to developing students who will grapple with the world's problems in new, creative, integrative, and collaborative ways as they make the link between knowledge and experience, information and action, and inquiry and learning.

  • Professor Craig Haney, Psychology: For passionate commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to teaching emphasizing structural, contextual, and situational frameworks and the use of data, theory, and reasoned analysis to alter students' perspectives of the legal system and criminal justice.

  • Lecturer Robert Kuhn, Biology: For a commitment to excellence and high standards and sincere dedication to students as they learn to think as scientists, seeking their own answers and making their own discoveries of the myriad subtle processes of biology.

  • Associate Professor Justin Revenaugh, Earth Sciences: For breadth of teaching within Earth Sciences and the development of a multidimensional, multimedia curriculum characterized by high expectations, abundant contact hours, and a focus on learning, cooperation, and shared responsibility.

  • Professor Barbara Rogoff, Psychology: For dedication to the human aspects of instruction, to students' learning as well as to new approaches to teaching, in a classroom characterized by student involvement, frequent feedback, respect, cooperation, and an emphasis on deep, long-term learning.

  • Professor David Sweet, History: For a profound love of teaching that seeks to awaken students' consciousness by insisting on human dignity, honoring labor, celebrating life, and listening carefully to others; in sum, for effectively carrying out the "subversive practice of love" known as teaching.

  • Associate Professor Daniel Wirls, Politics: For exemplary dedication to his craft and his students, emphasizing effective communication and thoughtful citizenship, and the maintenance of a delicate balance between teaching and research wherein research informs teaching and the classroom inspires research.


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