Associate professor of English and WGS program faculty member Julia Schleck was awarded the 2017 Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Distinguished College Teaching. Candid about her own methodologies and her place in the profession, Schleck carefully demonstrates how one can successfully integrate theoretical concerns with one’s personal engagement with the past, always mindful of the practical challenges facing present-day scholars and teachers in a changing academy.
Her contributions to teaching extend well beyond the classroom, and include mentoring undergraduate theses and graduate research, teaching practicums for graduate students, and discussions of course design and pedagogical techniques with her colleagues.
Schleck has written a thoughtful and inspirational teaching statement in which she compares her teaching to improvisational jazz – how carefully listening to students and responding to the class allows her to draw students into the material and to make connections between their lives and the literature they are reading. Students respond enthusiastically to this approach.
Professor of English and WGS program faculty member Maureen Honey won the 2016 Annis Chaikin Sorenson Award for Distinguished Teaching.
