Two HFA Faculty Awarded 2021-22 Distinguished Teaching Awards
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The Center for Teaching and Learning has announced four faculty winners of the 2021-22 winners of the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), including Jennifer Fronc, professor of history, and Mazen Naous, associate professor of English. Since 1961, the University of Massachusetts has presented the Distinguished Teaching Award to instructors who demonstrate exemplary teaching at the highest institutional level. This highly competitive and prestigious campus-wide honor is the only student-initiated award on campus. This year’s review committees, comprised of former DTA winners, noted particularly how difficult their task was given the excellence of the nominees and how exceptional these award winners are.
Jennifer Fronc, professor, department of history
Professor Jennifer Fronc teaches undergraduate survey courses in history as well as junior year writing seminars on U.S. immigration and the history of policing. Students commented on Fronc’s breadth of knowledge, writing that she was “never without an answer” when it came to student questions. Another student shared, “She taught us how to read better as historians, a skillset rarely explicated yet profoundly necessary for my professional and intellectual development.” After years of observing a shift in class dynamics, particularly around grades and a desire by students for their writing to be perfect before it was handed in for feedback, realized she needed to implement a change. As she wrote in her teaching statement: “I was struck by the inherent contradiction in my position, teaching courses on the history of policing and engaging in “cop pedagogy,” with strict attendance policies and punitive late assignment grading schemes. Was my role as enforcer tainting the learning environment and impeding my students’ willingness to fully and honestly engage with the course content, their classmates, and me?” In response, Fronc implemented labor-based contract grading into her junior writing seminars, where she assumed the role of editor and offered developmental comments on writing. This approach helped Fronc remember “the human attached to the paper I was evaluating.”
Mazen Naous, associate professor, department of English
Professor Naous, a previous winner of the HFA College Outstanding Teaching Award and past Lilly Teaching Fellow, teaches undergraduate and graduate English courses on literatures of conflict, contemporary Arab American fiction and the immigrant experience. Naous noted that he makes a point to listen to his students and develop courses in accordance with their intellectual interests. His course, Contemporary Arab American Fiction, was created because students asked for a course that addressed Islamophobia and the monolithic representation of Arabs in the U.S. Many students commented on how his courses have changed their outlook on the world and have turned “sleep-deprived college students into excited global citizens.” Another student shared that by teaching works that highlight non-traditional or underrepresented experiences, Naous encourages students to “write with a multi-disciplinary and socially aware perspective in mind; a skill which naturally translates well to other courses and beyond college.”