Outstanding teachers recognized
Friday, July 11th, 2008
English Professor Gary Harrison is the 2008 Presidential Teaching Fellow, the highest teaching honor UNM bestows. The Outstanding Teachers of the Year are Catherine “Kate” Krause and Gregory Martin.
Harrison said the most formative experience in his teaching career came when he had the opportunity to teach an innovative two‐semester course in World Literature with four seasoned, creative colleagues, Paul Davis, Patricia Clark Smith, David Johnson and Joseph Zavadil.
As part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, they developed what is now the survey of world literatures sequence. The course encompasses a diversified study of the world’s literature for students in an increasingly global culture, including key works from Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, Arabic, Persian and Latin American writers.
Harrison will use the two‐year fellowship to do curriculum development and assist departments in developing assessments of student outcomes. He is also interested in exploring ways to develop e‐portfolios for students to electronically store and document their writing and multimedia projects. E‐portfolios could be used as electronic resumes and accessed by employers who want examples of students’ work.
Krause, an associate professor of economics, has taught upper division and graduate seminars and teaches teachers about economics through the Albuquerque Teachers’ Institute.
Krause is a behavioral economist, and she considers what people do when faced with economic decisions that don’t have obvious right answers: Should I gamble? Donate to charity? Recycle? Leave a tip? She tries to encourage her students to be curious and skeptical about what economic models tell us about human nature. Krause frequently tells her students to write about their own economic behavior and the economic choices they observe around them.
Martin, a professor of English, was hired to implement a creative nonfiction concentration within the creative writing program. His students, who are all required to submit a manuscript for publication in a magazine, have been published in literary journals and anthologies and have had their work read aloud on National Public Radio.
He wrote “Mountain City,” a memoir of the life of a town of thirty‐three people in remote northeastern Nevada. That book received a Washington State Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
The Susan Deese‐Roberts Outstanding Teaching Assistant of the Year Award was given to Jennifer Harriger, developmental psychology; Elizabeth Dickinson, communication and journalism; Jaroslaw Kania, mathematics and statistics; Mark Ralkowski and Carolyn Thomas, philosophy; Jennifer Richer, American studies; and Damian Vergara Wilson, Spanish and Portuguese.