Teaching Excellence Awardees - from past years

Claude Goldenberg, Department of Education, Stanford University

This is one of (if not the most) outstanding professors I have ever had. Over the course of the 6 months that I knew him, he offered to direct my individual studies in a field that I was passionate about where no classes were currently being offered. He challenged and inspired me to constantly improve my work and my analyses, not for the sake of a grade, but in order to make our work useful for our community. We ended up co-authoring a piece on bilingual education together and publishing it in American Educator. His generosity with his time and willingness to mentor An undergraduate student are things I will never forget.

Robert Goldman, Department of East and South East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

… his passion for the subject, skillful teaching, and the course's interesting content were enough. That was enough to get me excited every morning to wake up and go to class. Very few classes at Berkeley had that effect on me. This man took a fairly dry subject (ancient literature/world religion) and made it really interesting.

He was a huge help to the Berkeley Student Journal of Asian Studies, a student-run academic journal that I led for the past two years. Over just three years, he reviewed and edited 5 of the 17 papers...including my own.

Alessa Johns, Department of English, University of California. Davis

Whenever I offer an opinion in class, I find her challenging my ideas and asking for another example or a broader significance. This direct intercourse of ideas and thoughts is unique to Professor John's teaching style and promotes deeper, critical thinking in her students.

Justin Whittall, Department of Biology, Santa Clara University (Hasenkamp Award)

Justen, however, is truly special among the ranks of teacher.  He expects more of undergraduates, and almost always, they deliver. Especially in upper division courses, he offers students the problems that he is currently mulling over at the beginning of the quarter, and they work through them with him for ten weeks, contextualizing lecture material in scientific practice. My current PhD thesis is an outgrowth of an inquiry I began in one of his courses, So certainly the work he gives undergraduates is in no way “dumbed down.

Early in my time with his lab, we had to take a short walk across campus so Justen could show me where to find some administrative location I needed to be familiar with. As we walked, we passed the old mission wall, some of which is still intact from its original construction. He remarked that iIt was an aspiration of his to take a sample from that wall, so that we could understand what the native grass communities of California looked like when the Spanish missionaries first settled the area.  We could learn so much, he told me, about human history and plant invasions and maybe even building practices.

Petra Dierkes-Thrun,Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Petra is certainly one of the most remarkable teachers - I have encountered at Stanford, both academically and personally. In fact, I can think of no one better to nominate for this honor.  Moreover, Petra is on the frontline of transforming the way education is conducted both in the classroom and through digital media. More than any other professor I have worked with in the humanities, Petra embraces new, emerging modes of teaching and communication via social media like Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms. For instance, I know from personal participation and also from regular correspondence with Petra that she has been quite successful designing and implementing digital pedagogy and blended learning in her classes at Stanford, and is doing things literally no other humanities professor is doing right now, namely taking the online medium seriously as a way not only to  package old humanities content in new ways, but to excite students about  learning in and with the public and connecting with the world about literature.  She has also been very active presenting her work in this emerging field at conferences and other universities, to help inspire other traditional humanities teachers to start experimenting and make the literature classroom relevant and exciting for students in new ways.

Emily Gottreich, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Comments: Professor Emily Gottreich is the single most influential teacher with whom I engaged during my college career. She both demanded and inspired excellence in all of her students. Rote memorization was insufficient in her classes, rather, she pushed us to critically think about our texts, make connections across themes and history, and actively participate in our classes.  All of her students knew that we could not float by unnoticed in her classes: she would come readily prepared with intriguing lectures and would include everyone in the class in theoretical discussions that required us to develop our own thoughts. She dealt with difficult and complex world issues, and taught us to ask questions and inquire about the Middle East with curiosity and fervor.
                                                                              
 She also took on additional work to aid student organizations, and was instrumental in developing the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) organization, a student club which focused on education, peace building, and cross-cultural engagement around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Additionally, she helped fundraise for events and even helped initiate the preparatory accredited classes for the OTI summer Middle East delegations.

Margherita Heyer-Caput, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis

She is in charge of one of my campus's study abroad programs (the Quarter Abroad program in Florence, Italy). When she came into my Italian 1 class during my sophomore year to talk about this program, I immediately knew that I wanted to be a part of it. Professor Heyer-Caput is a native Italian and has a very clear passion for the country, its culture, and its language. Her passion is what inspired me to want to study abroad and learn more about all of these things. My time spent studying abroad in Florence was amazing and incredibly rewarding. I feel like I gained so much from the experience, and I have Professor Heyer-Caput to thank for this. In addition, she also taught an Italian film studies class that I took while I was abroad, a class which I greatly enjoyed and learned a lot from, even though I had no prior knowledge of film studies.

Victoria C. Plaut, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley

I remember taking my first course with Professor Plaut in the fall of 2012. On the first day of class her credentials struck me; she embodied what I could one day be with my own dual-degree in Psychology and Legal Studies. Previously I considered the overlap of the subjects intuitive yet unexplored. Throughout the semester, she slowly uncovered an entire field that was founded on both of my interests. To find the intersection of your passions and academics is a powerful thing.

Professor Plaut’s course left me with several lasting impressions. First, how incredibly smart she was. Her command of the classroom and our interests coupled with her immense knowledge and kind demeanor catapulted the course to the top of my favorites list. Secondly, I began to understand how vulnerable and unaware humans are of our prevailing, conditioned psyche. Never before had I been so acutely aware of the social biases permeating every surrounding institution and my very own mind. Third, I realized how important it was to tailor information to your audience. Professor Plaut uniquely communicated otherwise intimidating empirical findings to an untrained audience so we could understand how this data supported standing Psychological theories and legal rulings. And finally, Professor Plaut was the first professor who challenged us to answer the “so what?” What could we do with these findings? How were they applicable to other students at Cal? What are the best ways to communicate these findings? Can they effectively inform policy decisions? These exercises both challenged and excited me; I was experiencing the critical-thinking aspect of education that Cal prides itself on.

Andrius Galisanka, Department of Polticial Science, University of California, Berkeley
The way he teaches political theory is also very distinct. For each theorist, rather than just going over the facts, he really places himself and the class in the place of the theorist's shoes. He taught us how to find the key argument of the theorist, how he came about to that conclusion, and decide for ourselves that theory is plausible or not. He taught us how to argue for and against the theorists' arguments by understanding them first.

Julie Anne Kennedy, Department of Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University

Julie pushes Earth Systems students to 1) deepen their passions, and 2) merge their academic and personal interests within community-oriented projects. In her Senior Seminar course, I was able to help a non-profit organization in East Palo Alto build a sustainable business model for the East Palo Alto farmer’s market.

Patricia Simone, Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University

She stands out because of her expertise in the fields of psychology, and in the subfield of gerontology, for her dedication to her students and to her memory research. And for her involvement in the Santa Clara community. She works closely with the Santa Clara Senior Center in a community based learning project having students compile a video for a senior on his or her most important reflections. Dr. Simone was a speaker at our Asilomar Conference in February 2015.

Dari Sylvester, Department of Political Science, University of the Pacific

In my first class with Dr. Sylvester, I could tell that the other students were scared. Not because she was in any way scary, but because she was challenging them to work hard and learn. The class was full of soon to graduate seniors; they all wanted to glide through their last general education requirement (Pacific Seminar 3, a class on philosophy and ethics required for all majors). Dr. Sylvester was not going to let her class slip through, but instead asked them to think critically about their world, like what balance of utilitarian philosophy verses deontological ethics was best .