Celebrating Teaching

Students and peers praise COLFA faculty

---

By Lisa Chantos

"I wish I could take him for every class, in every subject. Be prepared to think."

"I learn more in his classes than I do in all my classes put together."

These are just two comments from the stream of reviews left for Joe Rogers, retired UTSA professor, on RateMyProfessors.com. After three years of teaching at UTSA, Rogers was not only the sole Texas professor to make the Top 10, but he was also ranked sixth out of over 1 million professors on the Web site, which scores them on a scale of 1 to 5 in categories such as clarity, helpfulness and easiness.

From the boundless Web to the more intimate confines of the individual college, professors in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts are being recognized for demonstrating excellence in teaching. Some recognition comes from students, others from peers. “Whatever else we do in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, teaching is our main job,” says Dean Daniel J. Gelo. “We recruit and retain strong teachers and are fortunate to have many truly excellent ones who have been recognized with awards.”

Students aren’t just ranking their favorite professors online. In 2009, nominations were sent in by students from every college for the Distinguished Faculty Awards, which are presented by the UTSA Alumni Association and the Student Alumni Association. COLFA faculty members Lilian Cano, a non-tenure track lecturer in Spanish, and Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, associate professor of Latin American studies, were two recipients of this year’s awards.

A lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Cano was nominated by student Jim Geiger. According to Geiger, Cano positively reinforces student learning, which builds confidence in students regarding their ability to learn.

“Dr. Cano encourages students to take bold steps across a linguistic bridge into the Spanish-speaking world,” he says.

Oleszkiewicz-Peralba teaches courses in Latin American culture and women writers in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her nominator, Alejandra Osejo, says Oleszkiewicz-Peralba fosters critical thinking in and out of the classroom.

“Dr. Peralba is an encyclopedia of Latin art, culture and literature, and this makes her a perfect professor for this year’s award,” Osejo says.

Several COLFA faculty have also earned the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching Excellence. These awards represent peer recognition for excellence in the classroom, says David Johnson, former history professor and vice provost for academic and faculty support.

The awards “are fundamentally an evaluation of the nominee’s work in the classroom. The focus is on the effectiveness of teaching and teaching innovation,” he says.

This year’s COLFA awardees were Ben Olguin in the Department of English and Deborah Wagner in the Department of Anthropology. Olguin, an associate professor who has taught more than 50 graduate and undergraduate courses, was recognized as being a tough yet thorough professor by his students. One student wrote, “What I really liked is that the instructor got us to open our minds and to think.”

Wagner, an alumna and instructor, was praised for challenging students to critically evaluate ideas and arguments by encouraging active participation in the classroom.

“She has proven to be one of the most inspiring and influential individuals I have encountered in an academic setting,” wrote one student.

And recently, Richard Gambitta, associate professor of political science and director of the UTSA Institute for Law and Public Affairs, was one of 73 faculty members given Outstanding Teaching Awards from the University of Texas System Board of Regents. The award, given in recognition of high quality undergraduate teaching, also came with $30,000.

Teaching excellence

COLFA faculty members are noted for excellence in teaching partly because they get so much practice, Johnson says. “The college handles a great deal of the core curriculum and gets most of the university students,” he says. “We have a heavy responsibility to prepare students for the rest of their studies.”

With COLFA’s role in teaching students campuswide comes a responsibility for the faculty to keep improving their skills. One way they do that is through the UTSA Teaching and Learning Center (TLC). Directed by Barbara Millis, an award-winning teacher and researcher, the TLC promotes better teaching and helps good teaching be recognized and rewarded.

Since Millis arrived at UTSA in August 2008, the TLC has hosted 61 workshops and brownbag sessions on how to teach effectively. Of the 431 people who attended the sessions, 125 were from COLFA.

“They can be proud of that,” Millis says. “You can’t learn until you pay attention. You have to focus your attention. The COLFA folks are there in the workshops paying attention, and I think there’s a direct connection.”

It’s critical that universities focus on the teaching that occurs in their classrooms, Millis says. Too often, there’s so much emphasis placed on research that classroom learning gets brushed aside. But a good teacher can make an enormous difference, she says.

“A good teacher can help people not only learn important things—things meaning knowledge and skills and abilities—but they can also impact affective factors like feelings, emotions and ethics,” she says.

“A teacher who inspires can lead students down a path to lifelong learning. A good teacher is also a good human being.” Rogers, whose teaching merits are widely known thanks to the Internet, says his teaching philosophy is easy.

“You have to be passionate about what you teach,” he says. “The students will pick up on that and get excited about it. Use humor and meet them where they are. There’s always another perspective.”

As the dean of COLFA, Gelo has actively been promoting those very same qualities in his faculty. Among the deans, no one has been more active in promoting the TLC and its mission of teaching excellence than Gelo, Millis says.

“It shows not only that they care, but that they’re willing to invest the time,” she says. “Change takes time and it takes thought.”