Teaching awards

The university’s 1999 Distinguished Teaching Award winners take a good deal of pride in introducing a variety of innovations into an ancient art, using instructional tools.

They will receive their awards in a ceremony Tuesday, April 13.

Steven A. Ackerman
Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies
Chancellor’s Award

Renowned for his ability to inspire active student participation in his classes on the physics of atmosphere and oceans, weather and climate, atmospheric radiation and more, Steven Ackerman has made innovative use of the World Wide Web to engage students. By developing interactive, nationally acclaimed exercises for the Web, Ackerman gives students both practice in and immediate feedback on their studies.

“Teaching and research reinforce one another,” says Ackerman, now chair of the university’s Teaching Academy. “Teaching enables me to explore new areas and broaden the base of my research, and my research helps students keep up with current scholarly debates.”

Ackerman is a second-generation teacher: “My father taught sixth grade, and I think he may have been my primary motivation. It’s very satisfying to explain something that a student may have wondered about for years.”

James Dannemiller
Professor of Psychology
Chancellor’s Award

James Dannemiller has built an international reputation on his investigations into the development of visual perception, focusing on the infant’s selective attention during early months of life. In the classroom, he specializes in his department’s tough introductory course in statistics. More than 90 percent of his students rate him effective; how does he achieve that in such a difficult class? “I love to explain things,” he admits. “I enjoy trying out different explanations if the first one doesn’t work. I appreciate the challenge of explaining a difficult concept from different angles until I find the right one for a given student.”

Dannemiller has been teaching at UW–Madison for about 15 years. Today, student questions drive his teaching. “When I first started teaching, I scripted virtually every lecture from start to finish. Now, I see it’s much better to listen carefully to the questions students ask and to use those questions as a basis for presenting the material.”

Henry John Drewal
Evjue Bascom Professor of Art History, and Afro-American Studies
Chancellor’s Award

Henry John Drewal’s students almost always succumb to his displays of enthusiasm for African art and the art of the African Diaspora. Drewal coaxes engagement with the material by encouraging active participation with it, he says. “Experiential learning activates both sensory – physical – and intellectual processes, deepens knowledge and helps us make sense of the world,” he says.

For example, the 20-plus undergraduates in his African masking course learn about other cultures by constructing a mask of their own and wearing it. Afterwards, they write a paper, produce a photo essay or create a video about the experience.

One particularly talkative student “went as a mute person,” Drewal says. “She went a whole day without saying anything to anybody.”

Drewal’s own field work always involves film and audio records of oral and musical traditions; sometimes, he even learns his subjects’ own art forms. For example, while teaching in Nigeria he apprenticed himself to a Yoruba wood sculptor for seven months.

Sabine D. Gross
Associate Professor of German
Chancellor’s Award

Sabine Gross’s German drama students currently are deep in rehearsal for a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s dark comedy “Der Meteor,” an absurdist mingling of paradoxes and corpses. According to German department chair Donald A. Becker, Gross’s productions, a tradition since 1993, provide strong instruction in German language and culture, plus offer a rare opportunity for students from first-semester freshmen to Ph.D. candidates to work together.

The quality of intellectual awareness her students realize is at the very heart of the teaching/learning process, Gross says. “In working with literary texts, one of my aims is to encourage students to explore their own reactions and cognitive processes, to develop an understanding of how the mind works,” she says.

Indeed, one of Gross’s research areas is the process of reading, specifically, comprehension of and responses to texts. “I would like students to not only understand, engage and take pleasure in the works we discuss, but also realize the full complexity of the cognitive-emotional process of reading,” she says.

Sindo Kou
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Chancellor’s Award

“But what does it mean for the real world?”

Kou answers that eternal student question by illustrating how industry puts to use the principles he teaches in class. “This not only stimulates their learning, but also prepares them for the world after graduation,” he says.

Kou says this approach is the result of evolution: “Earlier in my career, I based my lectures on articles in journals and textbooks. The students were not very interested. Now, in addition to the readings, I use videotapes of engineering materials being processed, pass around the items produced and encourage students to tour some manufacturing plants.”

Mary Layoun
Professor of Comparative Literature
Chancellor’s Award

A founder of UW–Madison’s Teaching Acad- emy and the Bradley Learning Community, Layoun’s signature always has been her ability to get students actively involved in their own education.

She traces her interest in teaching to her grandmother, an immigrant from southern Lebanon. “Even without being able to read and write, she used storytelling to teach a great deal,” Layoun says. “She was my first and best teacher. I am indebted to her.”

While active engagement may be a straightforward process in small discussion sections, large undergraduate lectures often present more challenges, Layoun says. “Students sometimes expect to sit back and watch the show. I try not to meet that expectation, although the use of instructional technology sometimes makes passivity more seductive. I use technology in the classroom, but it’s crucial that students be engaged with what they’re seeing and hearing.”

On the other hand, instructional technology allows more powerful presentation of visual materials, including artwork, comics, statues, clothing, murals, social spaces, buildings and more, Layoun says. In fact, she is now developing a class in visual culture, with plans to offer it through the Department of Comparative Literature in fall 1999.

Laura K. McClure
Assistant Professor of Classics
Steiger Award

While her subjects range from the impact of classical literature on later writers to ancient mythology to the Greek language of antiquity and more, McClure’s teaching focus is on communication. She even uses e-mail lists and the World Wide Web to keep in touch with the hundreds of students in large lectures.

“I very much believe technology can contribute to effective teaching, but it cannot substitute for real contact in the classroom and the rapport it fosters between teacher and student,” she explains.

“My ongoing research insures my courses remain lively,” she says. “Even when I teach the same course over again, I always change the material.” On the other hand, “Research without teaching is a vacuum. Getting across new ideas to students and hearing their insights infuses my research with meaning.” Since arriving on campus in 1991, McClure has designed two new courses, one developed through a Lilly Fellowship during 1994-95.

Robert W. Pricer
Professor of Business, Management and Human Resources
Van Hise Outreach Award

Entrepreneurs across Wisconsin and beyond are indebted to Pricer’s personification of the Wisconsin Idea. One of Business Week magazine’s top 10 professors in 1997, he has served for the last 13 years as co-director of the School of Business Enterprise Center, which employs research and education in service to small businesses. In fact, “My own research agenda is dictated largely by the information needs of my students,” he says. Currently, he is studying venture strategies.

Teaching and research projects often take Pricer outside the disciplinary box of business. “In our current global economy, students must be able to draw on the broad resources and expertise of the entire university community to be successful. I accomplish this by requiring students to comprehensively analyze the local business environment as part of their class projects,” he says. n