IU Founders Day 1998

Information on Bloomington winners

York W. Bradshaw

President's Award

After only two years of teaching on the Bloomington campus, Bradshaw was named one of Indiana University's Outstanding Young Faculty members. His students are challenged to view the world through other eyes and to study issues that receive little attention in the United States, such as global poverty, hunger, war, "new" diseases, environmental degradation and the international debt crisis. Bradshaw has been involved in the active recruitment of international students and faculty, particularly from countries that are under-represented at IU. In 1992, he negotiated two international exchange agreements between IU and the University of Nairobi.

Romualdo De Souza

President's Award

A student-centered teacher, De Souza has fostered teaching "innovations." One of his colleagues noted, "In spite of the demands of his excellent research program, he has made time to do an outstanding job in the classroom and to develop an educational tool now used by several of the faculty." De Souza received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award from IU in 1997, the same year he was named a Gill Fellow. He held the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship from 1994 through 1998. He actively encourages high schoolers who show an interest in chemistry and he worked as a research mentor for IU's summer Exploration of Careers in Science Institute.

Paul D. Eisenberg

W. George Pinnell Award

Eisenberg has served on nearly every major committee in his department, as well as being department chair. In that position, he has assumed a leadership role in recruiting prestigious faculty, bolstering enrollments and establishing the department's reputation at the national level. He also has made a substantial commitment to campus and university governance, serving as both president pro tempore of the Bloomington Faculty Council and co-secretary of the University Faculty Council. His leadership was instrumental in the adoption in 1992 of IU's Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Policy, and he has served on the Commission on Multicultural Understanding and the Racial Incidents Team.

Christine Farris

President's Award

Farris has directed IU's Composition Program since 1994, and she also trains Indiana high school teachers to offer another version of course W131 for dual credit through the Advance College Project. She has been able to build an effective composition program at IU in part because she engages in ethnographic research into what happens in the courses and classrooms of both composition instructors and faculty in non-English disciplines who use writing in their courses. On the graduate level, she has shared with students her insights into women and literature as well as her work on narrativity in ethnography. She has enriched IU's undergraduate offerings with an advanced writing course as well as literature classes.

Michael McGerr

Sylvia Bowman Award

McGerr demonstrates to students the links between history and their individual lives in ways that excite, entertain and inform. In perfecting a large class lecture, he has adopted several strategies to reach students and prepares his lectures minutely, using two overhead projectors while teaching: one is devoted to a general outline of the day's lecture, the other to details of individual topics within the lecture. For McGerr, catching student interest is a means to a larger end -- understanding and appreciation of history. He often represents American history through the eyes of young adults of that time period and links their personal crises to larger events. His students begin to see history as a subject in which public events and personal lives are connected.

Rita Naremore

President's Award

Naremore describes teaching as a scaffold that supports student learning. "I no longer feel that it is desirable to fill up every class period with the sound of my own voice," she says. "I have learned from my students that not everyone learns the same way, and that making students more responsible for what they learn results in a better outcome." A colleague explains that Naremore does not recycle old lecture notes, examples or tests. Instead she "thrives on using fresh material, fresh approaches, new ways of illustrating. She is never content with what worked before, but wants to see if another approach might work even better. She is the model her students and colleagues emulate."

Rosemary O'Leary

President's Award

A recipient of the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs' Undergraduate Core Outstanding Teaching Award and its Graduate Core counterpart, O'Leary was elected by her peers to membership in the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching. She also received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. One student commented that "she invited us to learn from one another, recognize each other's strengths and open our minds to different disciplines. Of her teaching skills O'Leary has said, "It's not about me as a great teacher. It's about the students as great learners. Once I figured that out, teaching became a wonderfully fun challenge."

George Pinney

Herman Frederic Lieber Award

Pinney has spread his gospel of movement and joy (in acting) throughout the university through his involvement with the Intensive Freshman Seminar Program. Observed one colleague, "Whether training students to perform an intricate dance routine or helping them develop the analytical skills needed to write a thoughtful review, he leads his students through a carefully designed series of steps so that by the end they understand what they didn't understand before, and they can do what they couldn't do before." Pinney was honored by the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching in 1992 and received an Academic Development Summer Fellowship in 1994. He is director/choreographer of IU Broadway Cabaret and he regularly directs and choreographs for the IU Theater and Brown County Playhouse productions.

Bonnie Sklarski

President's Award

Recalls one former student of Sklarski, "Her interest and joy of the subject matter were so complete and so infectious that everyone was engaged. She was often really humorous. She once drew with eyeliner all over her face, making theatrical expressions to explain the facial muscles. She would circle the class, always exhorting and talking, keeping everyone in earnest concentration." Another former student wrote, "Now working in Maine, I feel Bonnie's presence in my own studio: when my work lacks rigor or ambition I conjure up her imagined disapproval. She is an artist of the highest standards who has no patience for facile solutions or styles which mask a lack of substance. When I produce something of value, I want to share it with her."

Albert Valdman

John W. Ryan Award

The author or editor of more than 40 books, Valdman, along with two others, prepared the Learner's Dictionary of Haitian Creole, hailed as an unequaled resource for Americans who seek to learn Haitian Creole. He also founded IU's Center for Creole Studies, which brings together teachers of Haitian Creole and published essential materials in the field. Valdman also organized a national Summer Institute for Teachers of French, which brings to the IUB campus 24 teachers of French from throughout the United States. He has taught at the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies, Hasselt (Belgium) European Institute for Sociolinguistics, and the University of Nice in France; as well as in Africa, Asia, Australia, Latin America and Europe.

Associate Instructor Awards

(Lieber Memorial Teaching Associate Award)

Jeffrey Grote

Because students often approach required foreign language courses with a mixture of indifference and anxiety, Grote tries to make his classroom an open, low-stress environment in which students can learn and experience more than just the Spanish language. He uses humor and lighthearted discussion, gets to know each of his students personally and brings information from outside of the Spanish curriculum which can be synthesized into the daily lesson. He created a manual for new instructors at the 100 level and worked with another associate instructor to compile a corresponding set of materials for the 200 level. In the spring of 1997, he was awarded the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Associate Instructor Teaching Award.

Walter Jacobs

Jacobs' department chair has written of him, "Using an approach which requires students to see him (and eventually themselves) in the material, Walt has been able to bring to life critical and sensitive issues of race and power which, historically, have offered a challenge in the teaching of sociology to predominantly white middle- and working-class students." Jacobs calls this method "the teacher as text, a strategy of using our personal experiences as teachers and individuals to help our students make sense of their own increasingly fragmented, partial and unstable perceptions and practices." He received the Department of Sociology's Edwin H. Sutherland Award for Excellence in and Commitment to Teaching.

Terri Winnick

Students give Winnick's courses (especially Sociological Aspects of Mental Illness, which she developed) overwhelmingly positive feedback. She organizes several trips each semester for her class to visit Madison State Hospital, a home for the mentally ill. Spending a day living with these people constitutes genuine understanding of the matters discussed in the classroom. Winnick's concern is evident in the many e-mail messages that she sends out to individual students -- reminding them about upcoming events, prodding for overdue assignments -- and in the electronic conversations that result. Her ability to nurture these connections with her students has earned official recognition in the form of the Department of Sociology's Edwin H. Sutherland Award for Excellence in and Commitment to Teaching, presented to her in 1996.

Information on Indianapolis winners

Sandra Burgener

W. George Pinnell Award

Burgener was co-founder of the Broadway Shalom Wellness Center, the first working example of her plan for a network of church-based, nurse-managed clinics than can reach into the inner city and provide health care for often-neglected populations. It brought together the facilities and access of a church with the knowledge and training of a corps of nurses. In one year, the center immunized more than 80 children, provided cancer screening to 199 women, helped 16 young men complete its anger control program, and helped hundreds of other patients handle health problems. In 1996, Burgener received the Midwest Alliance in Nursing's Leadership Award for Excellence in Geriatric Care for her work to improve the quality of life for elderly patients.

Amy D. Shapiro

W. George Pinnell Award

When Shapiro came to Indiana in 1987, comprehensive medical care for hemophilics in the state was practically nonexistent. Today, due to her efforts, the IU School of Medicine has one of the largest and most respected bleeding-disorder treatment centers in the United States. The Indiana Hemophilia Comprehensive Center at James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis provides state-of-the-art care for more than 700 persons with bleeding disorders. Not long after coming to the state, Shapiro discovered a large number of Amish men with hemophilia, a condition that had gone undiagnosed and untreated due to the Amish's insular lifestyle. She lobbied the Indiana State Department of Health to establish a program that distributes blood-clotting factor products among the Amish and founded a clinic among them.

George K. Stookey

Distinguished Professor

Back in 1957, Stookey worked as a graduate assistant to Joseph Muhler, whose research in stannous fluoride resulted in the formula for Crest toothpaste. To this day, researching and developing fluoride's role in tooth decay prevention are central to Stookey's work. One of his jobs as director of the Oral Health Research Institute on the Indianapolis campus is the investigation of ways to refine and further enhance the benefits of fluoride. While establishing IU's reputation as a premier source of scholarship in dentistry, Stookey has also tirelessly created a sound financial base for the School of Dentistry, ensuring that first-rate research can be maintained. He secured the first major National Institutes of Health research grant for the dental school, in collaboration with the School of Medicine, yielding approximately $2.5 million.

Information on East winner

Joan Esterline Lafuze

Frederic Bachman Lieber Award

One of her students describes the first day of class. "Dr. Lafuze requested that all students list on 3x5 cards their preferred learning styles. I thought this was a waste of paper and time. But to my surprise, these cards were used during lecture and lab to complement everyone's learning preferences." She employs slides, overhead projector, computer interfacing, student cards, outside reading reports, worksheets, group assignments, guest speakers and other activities in the classroom. Lafuze learns her students' names, majors and special interests early in the semester. She is a practitioner of an evaluative technique called "feedback loop assessment" through which she tracks her students after graduation and surveys them once they are in their careers.

Information on South Bend winners

Morteza Shafii-Mousavi

President's Award

Shafii-Mousavi's students often find themselves thinking: "Why am I enjoying this so much when I can't stand math?" He reaches out to every student, whether that person is a math whiz or someone with a history of struggling with numbers. Shafii-Mousavi explains: "I do not seek to shape students according to my patterns of solving problems, but rather involve them in creating examples, constructing proof and solving problems. I teach the students I have, not the students I wish to have." He works as part of IUSB's Teaching Consultation Team to help other faculty members increase their effectiveness, and received the IUSB Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997, the Teaching Excellence Recognition Award in 1996-97 and was honored by the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching in 1991.

Gabrielle Robinson

John W. Ryan Award

Robinson became the international programs coordinator in only her second year at IUSB, creating a new International Studies Certificate and a Latin American area studies minor. She has also increased the opportunities for American and international students to meet and share ideas through classroom visits, panel discussions and social and cultural events. She has also brought international scholars to campus, including Artak Grigorjan, a Russian theater and television director. Promoter of the Fulbright Scholar Program on campus, Robinson holds annual workshops to help applicants succeed. She created the "International Programs Newsletter" and led by example in her writing about foreign authors and lecturing overseas. She has served as a fellow at St. Edmund's House in Cambridge.