Ten teaching assistants recognized for excellence

Ten teaching assistants have received campuswide recognition and $500 awards to acknowledge their excellence as teachers and their importance to the university’s educational mission. The awards are funded by the Graduate School, and administered by the College of Letters and Science through a committee of faculty and staff representatives from the schools and colleges that employ teaching assistants. The awards are divided into four categories.

The Early Excellence in Teaching Award
This award recognizes outstanding and inspirational achievement on the part of TAs with fewer than four full semesters of teaching experience. The recipients are:

• Jacques Arceneaux, Department of French and Italian, was recognized for his energy and enthusiasm, and for his service as an ambassador for Cajun culture in the classrooms of his French department colleagues. A master’s candidate, Arceneaux also served as head TA for French 101, an unusual responsibility for a second-year student, and he is exploring the use of wireless Web technology in the foreign language classroom.

• Andrew Fox, Department of Astronomy, was called a “born teacher” by his supervisors, who were impressed by his ability, even as a relatively new teacher, to create an interactive atmosphere in which students worked together to solve problems and progress through difficult material. Fox, who is from Norwich, England, is writing his dissertation on the origins of high-temperature gas clouds in interstellar and intergalactic space.

• Chenqing Song, Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, has served as a TA for Classical Chinese, a challenging subject because it is no longer a spoken language. Her supervisor, Professor Hongming Zhang, credits Song for bringing an archaic subject to life for her students. Song helped design a Web site for the Classical Chinese course, and she is assistant editor of the Newsletter of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. Song is from Suzhou, China; her research interest is in Chinese linguistics, and the interface between phonology and syntax.

The Exceptional Service Award
This award recognizes outstanding teaching assistants who, in addition to regular duties, perform service related to the educational mission of their departments in areas including volunteerism, committee work and mentoring. The recipients are:

• Stephanie Kirschbaum, Department of English, was nominated by three English faculty members for the service award. She has played a leadership role as the tutorial director and assistant director of the English 100 program, she regularly mentors other teaching assistants and she volunteered to serve on the committee that drafted an ethics statement for the Writing Center.

• Navrina Singh, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, served as a coordinator for a time-management workshop for the College of Engineering’s Teaching Improvement Program, and later served as its co-chair, in addition to her outstanding performance as a TA. Singh volunteered to lead workshops on presentation skills and professional image, and served as the engineering chair for the Expanding Your Horizons Conference for 300 middle-school girls from south-central Wisconsin.

The Innovation in Teaching Award

• Robin Worth, Department of French and Italian, home department Second Language Acquisition, brings exceptional creativity to her work, and developed or adapted new teaching methods or techniques. From Stevens Point, Worth is interested in the impact of technology on motivation levels in foreign-language classrooms. She experiments with wireless computers that allow students to “chat” in class, a learner-to-learner activity that enhances participation by students who are less likely to take part in traditional teacher-centered exercises. Worth also designed Web sites for courses Italian 101, 102, 203 and 204.

The Capstone Ph.D. Award
The capstone award recognizes Ph.D. students who have performed as outstanding teaching assistants throughout their UW–Madison tenure. The recipients are:

• Kristin Matthews, Department of English, is a Madison native and Edgewood High School graduate who specializes in Cold War fiction. Her dissertation, “The Re(a)d Menace: Cold War Fiction and the Politics of Reading,” examines the relationship among reading, subjectivity and nationalism during the Cold War. Her department notes that Matthews taught an unusually wide variety of courses, including freshman composition, introductory literature and intermediate-level Comm-B courses in literature and writing, and her student evaluation scores were “spectacular” regardless of the course. Matthews serves as the assistant director of intermediate composition in the English Department.

• Michael Rawson, Department of History, was a teaching assistant for five courses in the history and communication arts departments, and was appointed in spring 2003 to teach his own lecture, a rare opportunity for graduate students, on the history of the American Revolution. Rawson’s hometown is Medford, Mass., and he studies American social and cultural history. His dissertation is entitled “Nature and the City; Class, Power, and the Creation of Metropolitan Boston, 1820-1920.”

• Patricia Strach, Department of Political Science, was singled out in her nomination for her attention to the interests and needs of her students, especially those at risk, and her status as a role model for her students and as a leader among teaching assistants. Strach, who is from Sunnyvale, Calif., is working on a dissertation on the causes and consequences of policymakers’ use of family to accomplish policy goals.

• Fernando Tejedo-Herrero, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, was such an outstanding teaching assistant that he was appointed as the instructor in Spanish Phonetics, a course take by upper-level Spanish majors, and rarely, if ever, taught by a graduate student. He comes to Madison from Palencia, Spain, and his research focuses on Hispano-Romance philology and linguistics. His dissertation is called “Variación e innovación léxica: Las Siete Partidas (1491).”

Nominations for the 2004 Teaching Assistant Awards are due Nov. 5. For information, contact Brian Bubenzer, 265-0603 or bubenzer@ls.admin.wisc.edu.