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Janet Donley honored for distinguished service to teaching
May 22, 2000
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Janet Donley, a mentor to some of the finest teachers in the Indiana University system, has been selected to receive the 2000 P.A. Mack Award for Distinguished Service to Teaching.
The annual award recognizes P.A. Mack Jr., civic leader, member of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, and former IU trustee. It is given by the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET), a statewide program supporting teaching excellence at IU. The winner of this year's award was announced Friday (May 19) at the annual FACET retreat at the Fourwinds Resort on Lake Monroe.
Donley is the administrative assistant in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures on the Bloomington campus. In letters nominating her for the award, she was described as the "heart and soul" of the Intensive Freshman Seminar (IFS), a program created on the Bloomington campus more than a decade ago to enhance the educational experiences of entering freshmen by preparing them for the expectations and demands of academic life. When she directed the IFS in the early 1990s, the program brought faculty together to share their knowledge and skills and learn from one another in a team approach that ultimately changed the climate for teaching and learning on the Bloomington campus.
In conferring the award, the selection committee indicated it had been impressed by the testimonials of some of IU's most stellar teachers, many of whom have won all-campus and system-wide teaching awards and are themselves mentors to other distinguished teachers across the IU system and the nation. All wrote of Donley's selfless service to teaching at a critical time in higher education and suggested that Donley is universally regarded as being a superb teacher of teachers and a mentor to mentors, a person who instills all instructors with a zeal for teaching and who empowers them with the skills they need to be the best that they can be. The evidence, the committee wrote, "revealed an uncommon and uncommonly talented mentor of uncommon and uncommonly talented mentors, a servant of the servants of superb teaching, if you will."
Donley received her bachelor's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles with a combined major in English and physics. She completed a master's degree in English at IU, where she engaged in doctoral studies in the fields of English language and literature, including Old Middle English literature and literary theory.
Her mentoring prowess was recognized as early as 1974, when she received the Outstanding Tutor Award for her work on the Watts Tutorial Project. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and she has been honored by the National Academic Advising Association.
Mack, who himself received the first P.A. Mack Award in 1999, was instrumental in expanding the FACET program, established at IU in 1989 as a Presidential Initiative. Mack also was the co-creator of an IU trustees-sponsored teaching recognition program, the Teaching Excellence Recognition Awards, which has provided funding for exemplary faculty across the university for the past three years. Mack's contributions to teaching practice were recognized in 1997 by honorary membership in FACET.
FACET recognizes and supports distinguished teaching faculty from each of IU's eight campuses and provides a forum for the discussion of teaching and university policy.
FACET presents the Mack award each year at its annual retreat, through a nomination and selection process involving university leaders and the 300 FACET award winners currently teaching at all of IU's campuses. FACET members, non-FACET faculty, administrators, professional staff, alumni, associate instructors and adjunct faculty, as well as others who have contributed distinguished service consistent with the documented goals and ideals of FACET, are eligible for this award. The winner receives a stipend and is invited to give a presentation at the annual retreat and to develop a presentation or other outreach effort for the larger IU community.
(Eileen Bender, IU South Bend, 219-237-4221, ebender@iusb.edu or Karen Everdon, IU South Bend, 219-237-6523, keverdon@iusb.edu)