English department wins CTE honor

The KU Department of English received the Center for Teaching Excellence’s annual Department Excellence in Teaching Award.

The award is designed to encourage departments to engage in programs and activities that move toward ongoing development of student understanding.

As part of the award, the department will receive $12,000 next fiscal year and will be honored at the KU Summit on Aug. 19. Three other departments also presented exemplary portfolios and were finalists for the award this year: chemistry, ecology and evolutionary biology, and psychology. All four finalist departments were recognized at the Celebration of Teaching banquet on May 8.

Previous winners of the CTE Departmental Teaching award were journalism and classics.

In winning the 2003 award, the English department demonstrated its commitment to this goal with a comprehensive GTA preparation program and a new faculty mentoring program, workshops and discussion groups that talk about teaching, curriculum innovation and community outreach.

The center considers three areas to distinguish the winner among the departments. Those criteria are: evidence of department-wide faculty cooperation to create and nurture specific programs or initiatives that connect faculty members in support of teaching and student learning; evidence of broadly based reflection on and consideration of the department’s teaching goals and objectives, including examples of goals for student understanding that reflect meaningful connections among courses; and evidence of recent innovations and sustained, department-wide efforts to implement the department’s educational vision, including descriptions of how the vision and teaching practices have been refined through examination of their results.