Three UGA faculty members received a Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Russell Awards recognize outstanding teaching by faculty early in their academic careers. Award recipients receive $10,000. The Richard B. Russell Foundation in Atlanta supports the program.
Gaelen Burke
Professor
Department of Entomology
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Gaelen Burke isn’t just teaching students. She’s creating future scientists.
“I am committed to the quality teaching of undergraduates inside and outside of the classroom and using novel approaches to engage students and facilitate their learning,” she said. “I believe it is critically important to pay attention to student needs and provide a supportive, flexible learning environment.”
To accomplish that, Burke has three goals for her classes. First, she hopes to increase her students’ enthusiasm for science and teach them to value and understand nature. Second, she uses evidence-based teaching strategies to engage students in the process of science through active learning and involvement in practical and research experiences. Third, she aims to teach students how to find and use resources to explore topics that are more specific or unfamiliar in addition to covering the key concepts of a particular discipline.
To meet those goals, Burke uses a variety of active learning techniques. For example, students in her “Insects and the Environment” class use M&M’s to learn about experimental design. Students use different sample sizes of M&M’s to calculate the frequency of each color of candy. Through this hands-on experience, they learn about the importance of experimental replication, how sample sizes can affect means and variation, and how to judge when one can be confident in experimental results.
Burke is also a hands-on mentor. She has mentored more than 30 undergraduate students. Six undergraduates have authored peer-reviewed publications, six have won small competitive grants to support their research, and two won a total of four prizes at the CURO symposium.
“Truly, Dr. Gaelen Burke is an outstanding model for what it means to be a driven, enthusiastic, engaging educator,” one former student wrote. “Through her engaging class exhibits, hands-on demos and genuine connection with her students, she is one of — if not the best — professors I have ever had.”
Her approach has already earned Burke the CAES Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year award and the CAES Early Career Teaching Award. She also participated in the Senior Teaching Fellows program.
Matthew Evans
Associate Professor
Department of Entertainment and Media Studies
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
Matthew Evans wants to empower his students in the classroom and beyond.
“My ultimate goal as a teacher, beyond students earning festival accolades or industry awards, is for them to harness and have confidence in their own unique voices, to communicate about visual storytelling effectively, and to be willing to engage in open dialogue with one another,” he said. “I want my students to have a strong foundation in the knowledge and skills of screenwriting for cinema and television, yes, but I also want them to emerge as more thoughtful, curious citizens of the world.”
Each faculty member in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies has a specific area of expertise. They are challenged to teach introductory-level to advanced-level courses in their particular area, with each level requiring different approaches and pedagogies.
Evans’ area is screenwriting, where students learn the craft and structure of storytelling through intensive writing workshops designed to mirror a professional writers’ room. Students develop and revise original scripts while giving and receiving peer feedback, emphasizing discussion, iteration and creative collaboration. He developed new courses in this area, including “Writing for Television” and a First-Year Odyssey Seminar, “From Script to Screen: Anatomy of a Screenplay.”
“Being able to analyze media has allowed me to fall even more in love with the craft and the dedication it takes to create stories worth telling. His instruction has fundamentally altered the way I critically engage with the world around me,” one former student wrote.
Mentorship is another important part of Evans’ work. He has mentored five students in credit-earning independent studies, several of whom have received honors at the Austin Film Festival and the Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Arts, including a student who won the Atlanta Film Festival’s screenwriting competition. His former students now work across the entertainment industry, including positions at Disney, Creative Artists Agency, Netflix and on the writing staff of “The Simpsons.”
Ingie Hovland
Assistant Professor
Department of Religion
Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Ingie Hovland knows that words matter.
“My goal as their teacher is to channel their interest in religion into an ability to respond thoughtfully to it — and to each other,” she said. “Undergraduate students leave my classroom having practiced the skills of advanced readers — and leaders. Having spent a semester regularly reading, carefully considering others’ perspectives and articulating their own, they are more able to respond thoughtfully to religion in the world.”
Hovland uses a five-step method to build her students’ complex thinking and leadership skills. First is practicing those expert reading skills. She regularly asks her students to “make a map” of their readings to help them visualize it. Then, she begins classes by having students converse about their readings. Those conversations lead to a class-wide active learning activity.
Hovland also has her students complete a written analysis, explaining their position on a topic. These analytical writing assignments show them that the concepts they read and talk about in class are relevant to their own ethical reasoning. All of that learning comes together in a final project that calls on them to ask deeper questions, to understand different perspectives, to think about complex human situations, to formulate an assessment of what is going on beneath the surface and to engage meaningfully in conversation with others.
“Dr. Hovland’s style of teaching relies on the students’ critical thinking skills. Rather than testing students on materials and facts, Dr. Hovland tailors course materials and discussions to evaluate concepts, abandoning the mere regurgitation of facts. By doing so, my peers and I learned to connect patterns and concepts and apply them in discussion and other issues outside the realm of class discussion,” one former student wrote.
Hovland has been invited to present on student reading at 19 workshops and panels at UGA, including Center for Teaching and Learning workshops, Writing Intensive Program workshops and the Active Learning Summit. She also twice co-led a Faculty Learning Community on student reading.