Annual teaching awards, grants to be presented at Teaching Summit

LAWRENCE — Two prestigious teaching awards and three grants for the development of teaching initiatives will be presented during the annual KU Teaching Summit, co-hosted by the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Office of the Provost and the University of Kansas Medical Center. 

The 2013 summit is Thursday, Aug. 22. The presentations will occur during the first general session in 130 Budig at 8:30 a.m.

For the first time, the Byron T. Shutz Award and the Ned N. Fleming Trust Award will be presented by the chancellor as part of the summit. Recipients of CTE's Department Teaching Grants will also be recognized.

Jeremy Shellhorn, associate professor of design, is the 2013 recipient of the Byron T. Shutz Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award was established by the late Byron T. Shutz in 1978. The recipient of the Shutz Award receives a one-time stipend of $4,000 and delivers a public lecture later in the academic year. The lecture is followed by a reception in the recipient’s honor. Faculty members are nominated for this annual award by deans, department chairs or faculty colleagues.

Cynthia Colwell Dunn, associate professor of music, is the 2013 recipient of the Ned N. Fleming Trust Teaching Award. The award was established by a bequest from the late Mr. Fleming of Topeka. The award includes a one-time stipend of $5,000. Faculty members are nominated for this annual award by deans, department chairs or faculty colleagues.

Three departments/schools will receive CTE grants to develop teaching initiatives during the 2013-14 academic year:

• The Department of Communication Studies received $5,000 for its project to fundamentally change course sequencing, selection and areas of foci for undergraduate communication studies majors. The department will identify objectives for the major, scaffold the curriculum to meet those objectives and assess progress toward the objectives using a model based on the undergraduate outcomes.
• The School of Music received $5,000 to redesign Music Theory I as a hybrid course, thereby increasing first-semester students’ understanding of Theory I content. The new course will allow students to do skills work ahead of class periods so that face-to-face meeting time can focus on discussing problems and finding ways through bottlenecks. It will also allow teachers to move instruction away from lecturing and toward guidance and mentorship.
• The departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures, French and Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures received a $4,800 grant for their project to re-evaluate and revise their doctoral comprehensive exams. The departments are developing a portfolio exam process that will represent students’ academic progress and professional growth. The units are collaborating on the basic design of the portfolios, then each unit will adjust the final product to suit the cultures and goals of individual departments.

CTE’s advisory board chose these projects because of their high benefit to the teaching culture of their departments and their potential to benefit multiple units at KU.

For more information about CTE’s Department Teaching Grants program, contact Judy Eddy at (785) 864-4100 or jeddy@ku.edu.