It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2022-23 CSSH Outstanding Teaching Awards.
Outstanding Teaching Award: Tenured/Tenure-Track
Silvia Prina, Associate Professor of Economics
Silvia Prina teaches a broad range of courses, including a very popular Behavioral Economics course that she created based on student demand. Her teaching is creative and engaging, incorporating a range of activities, experiential learning, and real-world data science. Beyond the classroom she is also an avid mentor, helping students through job interview processes and working with them closely as her research assistants. Several of her students have won PEAK awards under her guidance.
Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Assistant Professor of English; Director of Multilingual Writing
Qianqian Zhang-Wu is an exceptional teacher, whose innovative pedagogy is made even more effective by her dedication to adapt to the needs to her students. Her creative classroom projects foster critical thinking and applied engagement with categories of identity and power to, as she says, “promote justice-oriented learning experience.” Students and colleagues describe her as warm and welcoming as well as highly organized in her courses on global and multilingual writing.
Outstanding Teaching Award: Full-Time Non-Tenure Track
Emily Avery-Miller, Associate Teaching Professor of English
Emily Avery-Miller approaches her teaching with compassion and efficacy. Offering courses in first-year writing and interdisciplinary writing, among others, her pedagogy is service-learning oriented, enabling students not just to be better scholars and writers, but better citizens of the world. Avery-Miller’s teaching is recognized as remarkable for being thoughtful, well-structured, and direct. She always finds new and exciting ways for students to continue to engage with course material, one another, and their communities.
Outstanding Teaching Award: Graduate Student
Austin Barraza, PhD Candidate in Political Science
Austin Barraza uses innovations in technology to enable students to participate in their learning in a wide range of ways, both in the classroom and digitally. He also devotes much time and effort to developing inclusive pedagogical approaches, especially through his role as co-creator and co-chair of the Inclusive Teaching and Pedagogy Virtual Community of the Western Political Science Association. He teaches global studies and quantitative methods, and for the latter, he demystifies and makes accessible these methodological techniques for students who haven’t encountered them before.
Abbie DeCamp, PhD Candidate in English
Abbie DeCamp is innovative and inclusive in her teaching and has made impressive contributions to the digital humanities through new courses like Reading and Writing in the Digital Age. Students describe her as “passionate,” having “contagious empathy,” and praised her ability to “meet students where they are in the writing journey.” Through her classes, Abbie empowers students to be the best writers they can be and see the importance of writing throughout their lives.
Outstanding Teaching Award: Part-Time
Lisa McLeod, Part-Time Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion
Lisa McLeod is committed to her students’ holistic growth in the classroom and as future professionals who are also engaged global citizens. The iterative processes she incorporates into her assignments and activities allows students to refine their abilities to communicate but also to revisit and sometimes challenge their worldviews. Students noted her diligence in moderating course discussions, especially around difficult subjects, and her expertise and interest in the moral and social problems in healthcare, and the social determinants of health.
