The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has announced the five recipients of the 2024-25 Faculty Distinguished Teaching Awards, an honor presented for more than 60 years to instructors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who demonstrate exemplary teaching at the highest level.
 

Sarah Berquist

Senior Lecturer, Stockbridge School of Agriculture

Sarah Berquist is a past recipient of the Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching, the College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Advising Award and a former fellow in CTL’s Teaching Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (TIDE) program. 

Image

She teaches classes on agricultural education, leadership and retail floral design as part of the Sustainable Food and Farming Program. A throughline of Berquist’s teaching is experiential and community-based learning that “creates opportunities for students to connect with each other through collaboration in small group work and projects that directly engage them in both our campus and local community,” she says. 

She works with the Amherst School Garden Program to provide UMass students with opportunities to design their own garden-based science curriculum for K-6 students. She also created the Stockbridge Floral Design Program as a venue for students to gain real-world experience running a floral retail business. 

As one of her students describes, Berquist offers space for “each student to consider their own learning journey and how they could implement the class’s lessons, both academic and personal, in their futures,” through these experiential activities.
 

Rajesh Bhatt

Professor, Linguistics 

Rajesh Bhatt teaches courses ranging from a large introductory course on people and language to upper level undergraduate and graduate courses on syntax and computational linguistics. 

Image

Bhatt notes that for his students, “teaching is not a passive process.” In this spirit, he encourages students to see themselves as actively contributing to our shared knowledge of language. For example, in his introductory course, students go through the process of conducting a survey to learn about linguistic diversity. In his upper-level courses, he focuses on encouraging students to become independent thinkers through individualized feedback that centers student interests and highlights that uncertainty is at the core of doing research. Additionally, Bhatt regularly participates in international summer schools to support emerging scholars in the field. 

One student shares Bhatt has the “capacity to be personally invested in the growth of every attendee, ensuring that every student in that diverse crowd left the course feeling more confident in their knowledge of syntax or semantics or South Asian languages but also their belief in themselves.”
 

Eliza Frechette

Senior Lecturer II, Department of Kinesiology 

Frechette is a past recipient of the ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Award, the School of Public Health and Health Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award and is the inaugural Dean’s Teaching Fellow. 

Image

She teaches a wide range of courses, including exercise physiology, anatomy and physiology, Junior Year Writing and Integrative Experience courses in kinesiology. 

Frechette notes her courses are designed to help “students build confidence and emphasizes the importance of growth and mastery over time.” She does this through finding a balance between supportive structure, such as frequent check-ins and low stakes course activities, and offering flexibility, including the opportunity to co-develop her syllabus with her students. These practices create an inclusive course environment informed by students’ interests and perspectives. 

As a student describes, “Her creative and engaging class activities, such as the identity mind maps, placing questions under chairs before class, and many other interactive games, helped create an environment where we felt comfortable participating, both in small groups and in front of the whole class.”
 

Rachel Mordecai 

Associate Professor, English 

Image

Rachel Mordecai is a former Lilly Teaching Fellow and a former Instructional Innovation Fellow. She teaches courses on Caribbean literature with a focus on gender and sexuality, feminism and decolonial studies, as well as core English courses including Junior Year Writing and Introduction to Literary Studies. 

Across her teaching, she centers students as co-creators of knowledge, using techniques like collaborative thought-mapping and alternative grading methods to promote their development as critical and creative thinkers. In particular, she describes her approach as trying to “model a radical openness to multiple ideas” and guides her students to see writing as a learning process more than only a final product of their effort. 

A student notes that Mordecai “understands learning as collective knowledge, the space created in a dialogue and the quotes each of us pulled out [from the texts].” Through her radical openness, another student writes, “hers was a classroom where students felt like peers working together to learn, which meant that lessons stayed with me after the class because I had a hand in making those lessons.”
 

Kalpana Poudel-Tandukar

Professor, Nursing

Poudel-Tandukar is a recipient of the Chancellor’s Medal, the ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Award and the Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Research. 

Image

She teaches courses in the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing on health disparities, social justice and global public health. In her teaching, she guides students to acquire the knowledge, creative skills and perseverance required to become lifelong learners and contribute to providing health care to global society. 

Poudel-Tandukar blends targeted support for developing their research interests and individualized feedback with opportunities for experiential learning that addresses real-world health problems. Her community-based participatory research with communities across Massachusetts also informs her teaching.

As one student shares, “Dr. Poudel-Tandukar’s teaching goes beyond the transmission of knowledge; it inspires critical thinking and compassionate understanding.” 

Another student adds that one of Poudel-Tandukar’s remarkable strengths is her ability to make complex and sometimes difficult subject matter accessible and relatable to all students, regardless of their baseline knowledge or experience with the content.