Celebrating Exceptional Faculty and Advisors

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

As our campus comes into full boom and greater access to vaccines brings new optimism, we take this time to celebrate the successes of our faculty and staff who have persevered this year and worked hard to help our students. The Office of Instruction celebrates the innovative teaching and advising practices across our campus through the 2021 Creative Teaching Awards, FYOS Teaching Awards, 2021 Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Awards, and the 2021 Outstanding Academic Advisor Awards.

The Creative Teaching Awards recognized faculty who have taken innovative steps to promote student success in their classes and have made a significant impact at the University of Georgia. This year we chose four individuals who demonstrated their dedication to teaching through thoughtfully transitioning their classes to meet the complex needs of their students during the pandemic. 

• Leah Carmichael (School of Public and International Affairs) creatively reimagined her popular study abroad course and restructured it it to study how students’ personal food preferences tied in with national, religious, political and economic phenomena.
• Tina Carpenter (Terry College of Business) successfully transitioned her Forensic Accounting and Fraud Examination course, specifically her award-winning fraud simulation, to the online format. This transition provided collaborative learning opportunities that encouraged student engagement from afar.
• Jennifer George (College of Family and Consumer Sciences) guided students on how to use qualitative, first-hand resources to understand and interpret research and incorporate that research into meaningful written assignments.
• Bill Hollingsworth (Franklin College of Arts and Sciences) anticipating the challenges of teaching in a hybrid format, adapted his custom-designed online tutoring program, Grafstate, over the summer for his students and opened it to other faculty.

We also recognized outstanding First-Year Odyssey Seminar instructors who demonstrated creativity or innovation in instruction, connection of seminar content to the instructor’s research, and incorporation of FYOS program goals into the seminar. This year’s recipients have been fully engaged with their students, provided them with a strong connection to the university through their research, and tied their curriculum directly to FYOS program goals. Winners of the FYOS Teaching Awards were:

• Kristina Jaskyte Bahr (School of Social Work) — “Design Thinking for Social Innovation”
• Shira Chess (Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication) — “Board Game Design”
• Erik Ness (Institute of Higher Education) — “Research Evidence, Alternative Facts, and Fake News”
• Elizabeth Saylor (Mary Frances Early College of Education) — “HerStory”

Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Awards recognize faculty for excellence in developing, implementing, and sustaining academic service-learning opportunities for UGA students. This year’s recipients are Gary T. Green from Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and Candice Hollenbeck from Terry College of Business.

Four University of Georgia academic advisors have received a 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Academic Advising Awards. Elizabeth Fuller, recipient in the professional advisor category, Joseph McCall, recipient in the new advisor category, Jennifer Patrick, recipient in the advising administrative category and Julian Williams, recipient in the special populations category, were all nominated by their supervisors and selected by a team of students and former advisor award winners who reviewed the nominations.

Despite the challenges presented with the pandemic, these faculty and staff showed an unrelenting dedication to supporting students. Their commitment to teaching empowered students to not only persist but excel in a time of uncertainty.

Please join me in congratulating our winners and be thinking about what we can do to further innovative practices at UGA. I welcome your ideas to and hope to support you in these efforts. 

Sincerely,
Rahul Shrivastav
Vice President for Instruction