Tag Archives: Celebration of Teaching

Congratulations! Celebration of Teaching and Mentoring

Updates

awardsOn May 5, 2022, we celebrated teaching and mentoring excellence!

Each year, CELT seeks to acknowledge the efforts of Stony Brook educators who use exceptional teaching practices, dispositions, and proficiencies. Moreover, these instructors demonstrate outstanding passion for teaching; personal concern for students; and a devotion to inspire and nurture a learning desire in their students.

Congratulations to our 2022 CELT Celebration of Teaching Award Winners:

  • Santina Abbate, School of Nursing, Excellence in Teaching an In-Person Course
  • Sotiria Everett, Department of Family, Population & Preventive Medicine, Excellence in Teaching an Online Course
  • Liliana Davalos, Ecology and Evolution, Excellence in Assessment
  • Zaida Corniel, Hispanic Languages and Literature, The David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching

We would also like to acknowledge the Mentor Awardees, awarded by the Office of the Provost:

  • Danling Jiang, Professor, College of Business
  • Erez Zadok, Professor, Computer Science
  • Marci Lobel, Professor, Psychology
  • Thomas Weinacht, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
  • Clinton Rubin, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Congratulations to all!

Watch the 2022 awards ceremony

2020-2021 COVID Teaching Hero Award: Congratulations to Dr. Georges Fouron

Equity and Inclusion, Online Learning, ,

Rose Tirotta  Rose Tirotta, Ed.D., Associate Director of Teaching Excellence

Dr. Georges FouronOn May 6th, 2021, Dr. George Fouron won the 2020-2021 COVID Teaching Hero Award at CELT’s Celebration of Teaching. 

Despite the challenges involved in moving to a remote teaching environment, Dr. Fouron displayed grace under pressure as he adapted to teaching over Zoom where he demonstrated compassion and empathy for his students while maintaining academic rigor and teaching effectiveness. In referring to the educator John Dewey, Dr. Fouron remarked that teachers “shouldn’t be strangers to the realities of students’ lives.” Teaching during the pandemic taught him that students are resilient in the face of difficulties, and often says that he is not interested in having students agree with his views, but rather he wants students to be able to articulate their own perspectives as both teachers and learners.  His calm and determined demeanor throughout a difficult semester was inspiring not only to his students but to all of us here in CELT.  

I had the opportunity to sit in on two of Dr. Fouron’s courses and was impressed by the way he facilitated his courses. Dr. Fouron consistently asked for student feedback and, most importantly, asked students to share their stories. Dr. Fouron also had many interesting and powerful stories, which addressed race, gender, and class, among other issues. Any questions that were asked were addressed positively and I felt like his class formed a strong community with each other, overcoming the challenges that COVID pressed upon them. Starting each class he also addressed the students saying that this class was for them, that every student had a voice, and that voice had the right to be heard. 

What I think was the most powerful is that Dr. Fouron, after being a target of some horrible “Zoom-bombing” experiences, was able to accept me (and others) into his class for the semester and meet synchronously. He continued to teach Socratically and support his students during this difficult time (COVID) which provided them a sense of  community.

Thank you Dr. Fouron, and congratulations!

Congratulations to Sue Ryan! Our 2021 Excellence in Assessment Awardee!

Assessment,

Sue RyanSue Ryan, an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Development and a distinguished soccer coach who led the SBU women’s soccer program from a Division III program to a perennial contender in Division I in the America East Conference,   leading the team to 229 victories, is a familiar face at many of our sessions. Her background as a professional soccer coach informs her teaching in her graduate courses in leadership. She sees her role as meeting students where they are and that it is “her responsibility to take them someplace new; a new place of thinking, collaboration, and self-discovery.” 

In her course on Effective Professional Action & Leadership, Sue has several innovative assessments that help students make connections to course concepts. She uses the discussion boards to have students post lyrics to a song that reflect their values and thinking. Sue also has students select someone from history that exemplifies leadership for a case study analysis. Sue has found that connecting the curriculum to students’ own lives leads to real engagement and transformation for students. 

CELT would like to thank Sue for being engaged with us and would like to congratulate her on being awarded the 2021 Award for Excellence in Assessment at CELT’s Celebration of Teaching this past spring. 

 

David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching: Joseph M. Pierce

Equity and Inclusion, ,

Carol Hernandez  Carol Hernandez, Senior Instructional Designer

This year CELT introduced a new award, the David L. Ferguson Award for Inclusive Teaching.

Dr. Joseph M Pierce The inaugural awardee is Joseph M. Pierce from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Dr. Pierce focuses his teaching on transparency and invites students into a conversation where they can engage critically with difficult topics. In doing so, it allows students to situate themselves in relation to an author, a body of work, a canon, or a discipline. In his Decoloniality and Queer Studies course, he challenges students to question some of the disciplinary boundaries that he learned in graduate school. Dr. Pierce stated that, “the knowledge that is taken as standard and normative has often been produced through violence and erasure, and by questioning intellectual standards, it opens up the possibility to ask questions that students haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but that brings students into a more ethical relationship with the scholarship.” 

Dr. Pierce is Associate Professor of Latin American and Indigenous Studies. For his course, SPN 405 Issues in Hispanic Cultural Studies/SPN 532 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Hispanic Studies, he demonstrates all of the criteria for this award. Beyond the content, which focuses on Hispanic Visual Cultures/Decolonial Visuality in Latin America, he demonstrates a commitment to inclusive teaching and learning in his practice both inside and outside the classroom. For example, in the syllabus for this course. He is explicit in his own self-reflection on the choices he makes in the course content. He explains why he is choosing to assign readings in Spanish rather than the English translation as a way to address privilege in the academic publishing industry. He provides metrics on gender, race, and ethnicity of the authors assigned. As a way of helping students to feel ownership and a sense of belonging in the learning process, he assigns them to grade their own participation based on written expectations. His assignments include a variety of activities for students to read, annotate, write reflections, study images, and create cognitive maps. He provides an opportunity to submit one late assignment and calls it a “life happens” exception that students can opt for without needing to provide an explanation. In addition to the evidence in his syllabus, Dr. Pierce is a generous public scholar who works to inform the SB community on issues related to diversity, underrepresented populations, and white privilege in the academy.

This award was named after the late David L. Ferguson, who was a Distinguished Professor, former Chair of Technology and Society, and the founding director of Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Dr. Ferguson was a leader in and out of the classroom, driven by his lifelong interest in building diversity in STEM disciplines, and in securing the federal funding to achieve that goal.  

 

No longer “Javits homeless”!

Instructional Design, Online Learning, , ,

 Linda UngerLinda Unger, Senior Instructional Designer

Dr. Sangeet HoneyCongratulations to Dr. Sangeet Honey who was recently honored at CELT’s Celebration of Teaching Awards, for development of BIO 315 Microbiology, online. This course, when taught face-to-face in Javits, enrolled about 600 students each term it was scheduled. With Javits going offline this month, Dr. Sangeet Honey, Research faculty in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and undergraduate biology program director Dr. Peter Gergen collaborated with CELT to transition the course to fully asynchronous in Blackboard.

Quite a challenge–redesigning such a large course to a fully asynchronous delivery, but Sangeet’s commitment to his students and Peter’s administrative support made it both possible and, more importantly, effective. Beginning in August of 2019 (no, it didn’t take 2 years), Sangeet collaborated with two instructional designers, Linda Unger and Jennifer Jaiswal, at CELT to rethink how content could be provided, but more importantly, how interaction could be maintained with such a large group of students. Thanks to ample support from Peter in the form of grad and undergrad TAs, Sangeet and CELT were able to create an academically robust structure for students, while managing facilitation workload for Sangeet.

The first fully online version was taught in Summer of 2020 after the Spring course had hastily moved online mid-semester due to the pandemic. Since then it has had numerous tweaks each time to make it run more smoothly by maximizing effective learning activities and redesigning less effective strategies, especially with respect to assessment of students. This course has been taught in Spring 2021 with 400 students and is being taught this Summer 2021 semester with over 100 students.

Throughout these iterations, Sangeet’s “teaching presence” has been consistently excellent, as demonstrated through his recorded lectures; participation in discussion; Zoom office hours; and frequent announcements that provide guidance and general feedback. He also demonstrates compassion, flexibility and approachability with respect to his policies, especially his grading appeals policy.

Sangeet uses:

  •     VoiceThread for his recorded lectures,
  •     A variety of open source media to elaborate on lecture material,
  •     Bb student discussion groups (each led by a TA or himself) for clarifying concepts,
  •     Multiple, low-threshold assignments and quizzes,
  •     A large pool of questions and Respondus Monitor to safeguard exams.

A critical aspect of Sangeet’s success is his willingness to try new approaches and take risks with new teaching methods in order to engage students and promote learning using various modalities. He’s also worked hard (with CELT’s help) at making his materials accessible.

Peter’s commitment to sound pedagogy in large online courses, as demonstrated by allocation of numerous departmental grad and undergrad TAs, has enabled Sangeet to divide the >400-student class into “teams” of about 35–a critical factor that makes this course run smoothly by giving students a sense of community along with the individual attention they need.

In May, Sangeet received CELT’s annual award for Excellence in Teaching an Asynchronous Online Course at the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and CELT is delighted to have honored his work. Watch the video.