WP :: News :: Margaret Himley Named Meredith Professor For Teaching Excellence

Margaret Himley Named Meredith Professor For Teaching Excellence

The Writing Program is happy to announce that Margaret Himley has been awarded the title of Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence. This professorship signifies the highest achievement in teaching excellence on the SU campus. Margaret’s many contributions as a program leader in the WP and in LGBT Studies, as a curriculum innovator, fantastic teacher, mentor, and inspirational scholar made her the logical and hands-down choice for one of the Meredith professorships.

"Faculty across the campus praise her ability to create intellectual spaces for discussion and planning of curricular and pedagogical innovation. Members of the diverse group that developed the curriculum and individual course designs for the LGBT Studies program all attest to Margaret's creative leadership in their deliberations and planning. Few faculty members have had as broad an impact on teaching and curriculum, and few faculty members have the potential for even larger-scale impact than Margaret, " write Sari Biklen, Professor and Chair of Cultural Foundations of Education and Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence; Andrew London, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Co-Chair of the LGBT Studies Program; and Eileen E. Schell, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, Chair and Director, Writing.

 

Meredith Professorship

A substantial bequest from the estate of Dr. L. Douglas Meredith, a 1926 graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences, allowed Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw to create the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professorships in 1995, to recognize and reward outstanding teaching at Syracuse University.

Goals:

  • recognize and reward excellence in teaching
  • encourage faculty members to look upon the many dimensions of teaching as manifold opportunities for constant improvement
  • emphasize the great importance the University places upon teaching
  • and as a result of all of those, to improve the teaching and learning processes on campus.

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The nominating letter goes on to say, "While students note that Margaret challenges their thinking, they laud her for being 'open in her ideas.' In particular, she is expert at devising ways to bring current issues into the classroom, involving issues of diversity that could bring conflict or accusations of closed-mindedness in a teacher. She has studied, written about, and successfully practiced dealing with such situations, and has developed ways to avoid the pitfalls even while maintaining very high academic standards and generating student excitement in their learning. . . . The combination of enjoyment and rigor in their learning is repeatedly cited in her students' assessments of her teaching. Students particularly point to her particularly thoughtful and useful feedback to their papers—a strength in all of her teaching."

 

From Student Letters:

Professor Himley is unlike any professor that I have come across in my four and a half years at SU. She cultivates a classroom environment that places a true emphasis on critical thinking and self exploration, and encourages her students to engage in an idea with careful thought without imposing her own ideology.

 

It is truly impossible for me to summarize the impact Professor Himley has had on the trajectory of my scholarly life. I . . . discovered a range of academic interests that have now become the focus of my research, study and prospective career. Professor Himley worked to expose her students to a broad range of "texts"—visual, written and electronic.

This professorship will be Margaret’s from 2010-2013. She joins current Meredith Professors as a member of the Meredith Symposium and will be engaged in a special project of her own design for which the Meredith program provides funding. Of her project, Margaret says,

My proposal for the Meredith is to address the challenges of engaged reading by creating a new interdisciplinary CAS 200 or 300 level course [1] where we would do archival as well as secondary research into the activist histories, the moments of conflict and of resistance, of Syracuse and Syracuse University; [2] where we would produce texts, both written and visual, that represent these histories; and [3] where we would contribute to a digital archive (or "knowledge commons") of this work for other faculty and perhaps local school teachers to both draw upon and extend, an archive that I would design and manage with technical assistance from others, such as the library archivists. I propose that starting with the local and the particular, as a microcosm of democracy, demonstrates the importance of place as well as enables an analysis that links the local to larger historical events and debates, in the spirit of what Osterweil calls "placed-based globalism."

The WP would also like to thank Carol Lipson, Sari Biklen, Gwendolyn Pough, Andrew London, LouAnn Payne, and Margaret’s students who worked with us during the nomination process.