The University of Delaware's Faculty Senate has presented a prestigious 2025 award for Excellence in Teaching to Visiting Assistant Professor Alison Terndrup. A brick bearing Terndrup's name will be placed in Mentors’ Circle adjacent to Memorial Hall.

Recognizing that students follow different paths through their course material and absorb information in diverse ways, Terndrup makes her classes brim with opportunities to learn visually, textually and through lectures, discussions and role-playing debates.

She has students cycle through assigned materials in such a way as to build up to new ideas and, at the same time, re-encounter previous ideas from new perspectives. This is especially important in courses on Islamic art and architecture, where forms and images and references may be entirely unfamiliar to students, not to mention vocabulary terms in Arabic or other languages. Cycling through course materials and revisiting key objects from different perspectives leads students to think outside their own borders, thereby equipping them with tools for lifelong learning. 

Terndrup has also been experimenting with the responsible integration of AI in the classroom and was interviewed about it in the University of Delaware Magazine, UDaily, and ON: Cultivating Student Engagement in Higher Ed Podcast. 

In addition, Terndrup deftly weaves historical material with contemporary issues, an ambition always at risk of distorting history to fit present-day conception. In her hands, however, students come to see the relevance of their academic studies not so much in terms of specific historical content, but in terms of core issues that remain with us today.  She conveys to students how history continues to color the cultural landscape and shape social interactions. 

Class discussions and collaborative exercises thereby resonate with relatable issues, leading students to recognize what matters to their peers as well as to themselves. They see firsthand how openness, mutual respect and accommodation can lead to cultivating their own perspectives in the shared pursuit of knowledge. More than having students hear about the stories of the past, pedagogical approaches such as these ask students themselves to open the door to diversity and a more complex way of understanding the world.

Terndrup’s book, Image of the Modern Ottoman Sultan: Visibility, Identity, and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, is set to be published in 2025.