Recipients of Clark’s annual faculty awards announced at Commencement During the 2016 Commencement ceremony, President Robert K. Knight announced the names of the recipients of the 2016 Clark College Exceptional Faculty Awards. The awards are presented annually to full-time and part-time faculty members. Nominations can be submitted by Clark College students, faculty, classified employees,…
Four gifted teachers trace the paths that led them to this year’s Exceptional Faculty Awards An interesting pattern emerged while interviewing the recipients of the 2014 -2015 Clark College Exceptional Faculty Awards: In each case, when the faculty member was asked how they came to teach at Clark, he or she would grin,…
Professor Michiyo Okuhara is well aware that students who enroll in her Japanese courses probably have a limited understanding of her home country’s culture. “They see it in pop culture—anime, manga, Hello Kitty—or sometimes traditional things like samurai,” she says. “In class we don’t focus on animation or comic books. We try to inspire them…
Alison Dolder has got to have, hands-down, the best-smelling classroom at Clark College. The Bakery instructor and interim department head spends much of her time guiding students as they work in the program’s lab, which is also a fully functional bakery. Racks of pie shells and biscuits stand by the doorway, and the air is…
Matthew Gallaher’s English Composition is winding down for the day. “If you have any last-minute questions, I’ll stick around,” the instructor tells his students, who are broken up into groups to “workshop” their papers with their classmates. Gallaher sits down near one slump-shouldered student. “How are you doing?” he asks the student. “Do you have…
Steven Clark’s office is full of animals. There’s the “Cats Against the Bomb” calendar; the poster of the grizzly bear; the woodblock print of a turtle; the vintage Audubon Society birdwatching chart; photos of bees, rodents, spiders, his dogs. The effect is something like walking into a natural history museum that’s been shoved into a…
Learn more about this year’s Exceptional Faculty Award winners A professor who never planned on going to college, A Web-savvy wiz who stays in touch with students on Twitter, an aspiring academic who turned his back on the ivory tower in favor of more hands-on teaching, and an experienced clinician who takes the…
Chris Martin has gathered the students from his Web Video Production class in the hallway outside their classroom to demonstrate how to set up an interview shot. One student—a burly guy with a baseball cap and gray beard—has affably agreed to stand in front of the camera as the “interviewee.” “Now let’s think about camera…
We’ve all heard the cliché that kids say the darndest things. But people rarely point out its corollary: So do adults. As an Early Childhood Education professor, Sarah Theberge says she is often just as surprised by what her students express in the classroom as she is by what children in the college’s Child &…
Exceptional Faculty Award recipient Jim Wilkins-Luton can tell you the exact moment when the course of his career changed. He was in his final year of graduate studies at Gonzaga University, listening to an English professor discuss Milton in pedantic detail. At the time, Wilkins-Luton was well on his way to following that professor’s path.…
