Related Link: | Established in 1974, the President's Awards recognize outstanding teaching and can be given in any division of the university at any professorial rank. |
Sociology, IUB
After only two years of teaching on the Bloomington campus, Bradshaw was named one of Indiana University's Outstanding Young Faculty. His students are challenged to view the world through other eyes and to study issues that receive little attention in the United States, such as global poverty, hunger, war, "new" diseases, environmental degradation and the international debt crisis. Bradshaw has been involved in the active recruitment of international students and faculty, particularly from countries that are under-represented at IU. In 1992, he negotiated two international exchange agreements between IU and the University of Nairobi.
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Chemistry, IUB
A student-centered teacher, de Souza has fostered teaching innovations.
"In spite of the demands of his excellent research program, he has made time to do an outstanding job in the classroom and to develop an educational tool now used by several of the faculty," noted one colleague. De Souza was the recipient of a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award from IU in 1997, the same year he was named a Gill Fellow. He held the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship from 1994-1998. He actively encourages high school students who show an interest in chemistry and worked as a research mentor for IU's summer Exploration of Careers in Science Institute.
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 Christine Farris (left) with graduate student Beth Weisenberger
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English, IUB
At the heart of the IUB freshman year: English W131-Elementary Composition. "W-131 is 'the house that Chris built,'" says Kenneth Johnston, chairperson of Farris' department. That "house" has many tenants. Each year, Farris reaches 125 associate instructors and 6,000 students through her work, including Indiana high school teachers through the Advance College Project. On the graduate level, she has shared with students her insights into women and literature as well as her work on narrativity in ethnography. She is, said Johnston, a model for "teaching what she researches and researching what she teaches." She is also a poet. Mining the Beaches for Watches and Small Change was published in 1981 by Konglomerati Press.
Related Link:
http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/
 (From left) Lisa Lenz, Rita Naremore and Rebecca Miles. Lenz and Miles are speech-language pathology graduate students.
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Speech and Hearing, IUB
Naremore describes teaching as a scaffold that supports student learning.
"I no longer feel that it is desirable to fill up every class period with the sound of my own voice," she says. "I have learned from my students that not everyone learns the same way, and that making students more responsible for what they learn results in a better outcome." A colleague explains that Naremore does not recycle old lecture notes, examples or tests. Instead, she "thrives on using fresh material, fresh approaches, new ways of illustrating. She is never content with what worked before, but wants to see if another approach might work even better. She is the model her students and colleagues emulate."
Related Link:
http://www.indiana.edu/~sphsdept/home.html
 Rosemary O'Leary (left) with second-year MPA student David Pinzino
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School of Public and Environmental Affairs, IUB
A recipient of the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs' Undergraduate Core Outstanding Teaching Award and its Graduate Core counterpart, O'Leary was elected by her peers to membership in the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching. She also received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. "She invited us to learn from one another, recognize each other's strengths and open our minds to different disciplines," said one student. Of her teaching skills, O'Leary says, "It's not about me as a great teacher. It's about the students as great learners. Once I figured that out, teaching became a wonderfully fun challenge."
It wasn't always that way. "True disaster" struck her first semester when even front-row students fell asleep during her highly polished lecture. O'Leary recalls her discouraged reaction: "Clearly, teaching was not for me. My intent at the time, honestly, was not to become a distinguished teacher, or even a good teacher, but merely to survive in the classroom."
Responding to her initial classroom trauma, O'Leary has since developed a teaching strategy that emphasizes interactive learning and the cultivation of a lifelong critical thinking process. She now attaches a "warning label" to her course syllabi, advising students: "If you are interested in a safe lecture class where students are allowed to act as passive knowledge sponges, this class is not for you."
Related Link:
http://www.indiana.edu/~speaweb/index.html
 Morteza Shafii-Mousavi (left) with Dean Johnson, a mathematics major
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Mathematics, IU South Bend
Shafii-Mousavi's students often find themselves thinking: "Why am I enjoying this so much when I can't stand math?" He reaches out to every student, whether that person is a math whiz or someone with a history of struggling with numbers.
Shafii-Mousavi explains: "I do not seek to shape students according to my patterns of solving problems, but rather involve them in creating examples, constructing proof and solving problems. I teach students I have, not the students I wish to have." He works as part of IU South Bend's Teaching Consultation Team to help other faculty members increase their effectiveness and was a recipient of the IUSB Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997, the Teaching Excellence Recognition Award in 1996-97 and was honored by the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching in 1991.
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Fine Arts, IUB
When she began teaching in 1970, Sklarski was "stunned by how difficult it was to take a disparate group of art students conditioned by television and modernity's cult of the individual and give them a solid traditional education." She had felt that she, an art student of the '60s, had not received enough background in historical techniques, anatomy, or perspective‹in short, she says, "no real direction."
She began teaching a drawing course that emphasized anatomy. The course progressed to include an ecorche, a three-dimensional clay figure, flayed to show all of the muscles in their exposed state. Eventually the use of the ecorche gave way to drawing from skeletons, from plaster cadaver casts and from live models. Skalarski's course, Artistic Anatomy, has become a central part of the fine arts curriculum.
Recalls one former student: "Her interest and joy of the subject matter were so complete and so infectious that everyone was engaged...She was often really humorous...She once drew with eyeliner all over her face, making theatrical expressions to explain the facial muscles... she would circle the class, always exhorting and talking, keeping everyone in earnest concentration." Another former student wrote: "Now working in Maine, I feel Bonnie's presence in my own studio: when my work lacks rigor or ambition, I conjure up her imagined disapproval. When I produce something of value, I want to share it with her."
Related Link:
http://www.fa.indiana.edu/~fina/
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