Honors Faculty Anelli, Carris Win Top WSU Awards, Collaborate on New Courses
Two Honors College faculty colleagues are the recipients of prestigious, WSU-wide awards.
Carol Anelli received Washington State University’s 2008-2009 Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction. On the Honors faculty since 1996, she has developed and taught five new courses for the college, including a one-credit thesis proposal seminar. Her award was presented at the WSU Showcase event in March, celebrating the achievements of WSU faculty and staff. Her course contents, materials, teaching methods, and examinations have been highly praised by students and peers on the local and national level.
Lori Carris was named a 2009 WSU Woman of Distinction at the WSU Women’s Recognition Luncheon also in March. She was recognized for fostering the personal and professional growth of women at WSU, for mentoring students and colleagues, and for supporting and sustaining a diverse community of students throughout her 20-year career at WSU. Her award was presented by President Elson S. Floyd at the event.
Collaborations on classes
Their awards are not related, but coincidentally this year the two scientists had worked closely in developing two of Honors’ newest courses—a lower-division and an upper-level course that would build students’ skills from one class to the next. Both are interdisciplinary and carefully designed to help students learn to follow processes as they retrieve and analyze scholarly information, says Anelli.
Anelli, associate professor of entomology and Honors thesis advisor and teacher, created and taught UH 290, “Science as a Way of Knowing,” for students intending to major in a science field. Her course centers on biology, its history and its place in current topics, but she says any scientific field could be plugged into the course design.
In it, students learn to use WSU Libraries resources and explore scholarly journals. They begin by exploring a current topic—one that Anelli designs to require more “information literacy” and “critical thinking” than simply doing a search for answers on the Internet. Next, they have a group take-home exam and must use an online collaborative discussion forum that Anelli can drop in on. Finally, their task becomes more robust when Anelli challenges them to do a group case study, answering a bigger, more complicated question with many aspects calling for different perspectives from many fields.
“Just the group take-home is new to me,” says Anelli, who has had a great time with her students in both the fall and spring sessions of the class. “I really enjoy this one.”
Implementing processes
Carris, an associate professor of plant pathology, is teaching her first Honors class this spring semester—UH 390 “Global Issues in Science.” She designed it to be interdisciplinary with a global approach to the sciences. Due to scheduling this semester, not all students in this follow-up course to Anelli’s are science majors or have taken UH 290, so Carris has made some adjustments in her expectations and in how she teaches the class.
As a fungal taxonomist/biologist, she has students explore a biological approach to the topic of climate change. The underlying theme is “anthropogenic change.” Among the topics covered are biodiversity (or the loss of it), environmental toxins, global spread of pathogens, and how to feed the world’s population. Her Honors students have discussed subjects like the phenomena of the decline in amphibian populations worldwide, and the mysterious disappearance of honeybees in the U.S.
“My students don’t all have science backgrounds and I try to have lessons reflect current topics in the news, so the class is always a ‘work in progress’ for me,” Carris says. “All of the students are very bright and very motivated.
“Teaching in Honors has been an interesting experience that I am enjoying very much.”
Once students have taken the series, they should have lifelong skills to help them formulate informed opinions on just about any topic, says Anelli.