The ECL would like to congratulate this year’s award-winning teachers!
Professor Brad Hammer is the recipient of the J. Carlyle Sitterson Award for Teaching 1st-year students. Prof. Hammer “was pleased to win the award because the students drove the nomination process. A lot of the students tell me that my section of ENGL 105i (Health and Medicine) has the reputation of being extremely hard so, when I won, it felt like the students were affirming something meritorious about the value of their hard work.”
Prof. Hammer emphasizes argumentation in his pedagogy: “I put a lot of effort into reviewing the students’ work and then creating assignments that directly address the students’ difficulties with / assumption about argumentation. I’ve spent the last 30+ years thinking endlessly about what it means to teach writing effectively. In this endeavor, I don’t merely want the students to become better writers but rather more complex thinkers as they learn to roadmap arguments free of logical fallacy.”
Karah Mitchell received the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants. Upon winning the award, Mitchell “felt extremely grateful to have had the chance to teach and to learn from so many wonderful students at UNC – Chapel Hill. During my time as a graduate student, I’ve grown tremendously not only as a researcher and a writer but also as a teacher. When I started the PhD, I knew I would of course be teaching while working on my degree, but I didn’t realize just how much I would grow as a teacher!”
Mitchell hopes to impact her students not only academically but also as individuals: “I hope for students in my classes to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, how they think, why they think the way they do, and how they can navigate life with the utmost care, compassion, and curiosity (we truly never stop learning!). Whether it’s a literature class or a composition class, these are my end goals, and I view the material being taught as so many invitations to think deeply, to reflect sincerely, and to grow intentionally as an individual in the world.”
Professor Florence Dore is the 2024 nominee for the Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching: “The BOG Teaching nomination is a real honor. I am privileged to teach both songwriting and American literature here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and in both kinds of classes, I aim to bring joy and creativity into the pursuit of knowledge. My principle motivation as a teacher is to model and stir up the pleasures of creative intellectual pursuit, and for me it is precisely this joy that renders what we do in the classroom so much more than filling students with knowledge. It is my abiding hope that my Carolina students take from my classes both the tools and the desire for a lifetime of learning.”
Congratulations to these excellent teachers in the department!
