Excellent teachers, advisers honored

Five faculty members, three of them also UD alumni, received awards at Honors Day this spring in recognition of their outstanding work in teaching and advising, and two teaching assistants also received awards for excellence.

The four Excellence in Teaching Awards were presented to Kenneth C. Haas, AS ’68, ’71M, professor of criminal justice; Carolee A. Polek, associate professor of nursing; Patricia Sloane-White, assistant professor of anthropology; and Julie K. Waterhouse, CHS ’73, ’79M, CHEP ’97PhD, associate professor of nursing. The Excellence in Advising Award was given to Michelle Provost-Craig, CHS ’81M, associate professor in the Department of Health, Nutrition and Exercise Sciences.

The awards are based primarily on student evaluations.

Each winner of the teaching award receives $5,000, has his or her portrait hung in Morris Library for five years and has a brick, inscribed with his or her name, installed in Mentors’ Circle. The advising honor includes a $2,500 award and an inscribed brick in Mentors’ Circle.

Haas has a record for Excellence in Teaching and Advising awards dating to 1970, when he was pursuing his master’s degree and received the first Award for Excellence in Teaching for Graduate Students. He went on to receive three other teaching awards, including this year’s, and an advising award.

Haas, whose field of research is the death penalty and laws relating to it, joined the faculty in 1978. One of his classroom innovations is to play theme music before each lecture, such as Leadbelly’s Birmingham Jail when he discusses Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It not only sets the tone, he says, but many students arrive early for class.
An oncology nurse, Polek began teaching at UD in 1999 on contract and joined the faculty in 2001.

“I am a visual learner, and I use anecdotes and sometimes props in my teaching,” she says. “My office is a pigsty, crammed with everything from model organs to a model my children made of the genetic helix with stuff from Home Depot.”

For instance, Polek says, if she is teaching a class in ethics, she dons her Judge Judy apparel. When teaching about the immune system, she borrows camouflage equipment and warns public safety officials she will be carrying a water pistol as she demonstrates the T-cell’s function.

Sloane-White, who joined the faculty in 2002, used technology this past semester to teach a combined class of UD students and students in Malaysia (see article on next page).

“My job as a professor of anthropology is to help students begin a journey of discovery about the world that can transform their lives forever,” she says.

“I research, study and teach about Asia and the different cultures of capitalism and try to work ideas about the culture of money, power and work into all my teaching. I find students to be deeply interested in what interests me as an anthropologist: the global reach of capitalism, economic culture and how culture and our economic lives intertwine.”

Waterhouse, a faculty member since 1978, earned her doctorate in measurement, statistics and evaluation. She conducts research involving statistical evaluations of licensure exams for nursing, as well as medical-surgical nursing, and she teaches classes in adult health nursing and the process of diseases from cause to development to diagnosis.

“I am a good teacher, but a rigorous teacher and a hard grader—one reason being that I am thinking of the patients my students will be caring for in the future,” Waterhouse says, adding that she makes an effort to know all her students by name, even in the largest classes.

Provost-Craig joined the faculty in 1995 after earning her doctorate in exercise physiology. Her research interests involve clinical exercise, bone health and activity and energy expenditure.

“In exercise physiology, the career goals of most of our students are graduate schools in physical therapy, occupational therapy, dentistry, medicine and allied health fields,” she says.

“I keep graduate school rankings on hand and advise students to aim high, medium and low in their applications, look over their application essays and write many letters of recommendation. I also help find internships and practicum courses and, when students are interested, try to facilitate their involvement in research programs.”

The recipients of the Excellence in Teaching Awards for graduate students are doctoral students Michel Anthony (Tony) Anderson and Stela Stefanova, who receive $1,500 each for their work as teaching assistants. Anderson is pursuing his doctorate in education, and Stefanova is studying economics.