Athens, Ga. – Four University of Georgia faculty members have been selected to be honored with First-Year Seminar Outstanding Instructor Awards by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the Seminar program.
Betty Jean Craige, Mark Farmer and Juergen Wiegel of the Franklin College and Robert Shewfelt of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences were named winners of the award, according to Senior Associate Dean Hugh Ruppersburg, who directs the First-Year Seminar Program.
“These awards recognize seminar instructors for their innovative approach to the courses, for highly successful teaching and for their participation in the program,” said Ruppersburg. “These winners have consistently offered creative and academically rigorous seminars that have helped this program achieve the goals it was intended to serve.”
The seminar program began in the winter term of 1997, and through it the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences offers a special opportunity to first-year students: an additional one-credit seminar. These seminars provide an opportunity for students new to the university to become acquainted with a senior faculty member and to learn something about the excitement of study and research in a specific discipline and the intellectual challenge of academic life at the University of Georgia.
Most first-year seminars meet for one hour each week. They are taught by some of the most distinguished members of the university faculty who focus on topics of special interest to their research and teaching.
Craige, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and University Professor of comparative literature, won for her seminars on “The Desegregation of the University of Georgia,” “The Ideas of Daniel Quinn” and “The Environmentalism of Barbara Kingsolver.”
Farmer, professor and head of the department of cellular biology, and Wiegel, professor of microbiology, won for “The Origins of Life,” the seminar they co-taught.
Shewfelt, a professor in the department of food science and technology, won for his seminar, “Chocolate Science.”
The winners will receive a certificate at the Franklin College Faculty Awards Luncheon on May 1. Each also will receive a one-time research/support account of $1,000 to be used in the 2008 fiscal year.