By the time Alan Wood finished high school, he'd sailed twice around the world. Years later as a professor at UW Bothell, he circumnavigated the world twice more with 600 students from all over the country. "You see more of a sense of unity in the world from the deck of a ship," he says.

Back on dry land, Wood's seafaring voyages have as profound a place in his classroom, shaping his worldview as well as his teaching philosophy. "The sense of community that developed on board ship turned out to have life-changing effects on almost everyone," he says. "I have a deep desire to replicate that community in each class that I teach."

Wood's efforts, and apparent success, at doing so have earned him the UW Bothell 2004 Distinguished Teacher Award. His students describe him as a talented, caring teacher and a willing mentor. In a letter of nomination, former student Stephen Ssemaala writes "Dr. Wood's teaching strategies make education more insightful, more compassionate, more wise and more humane instead of more competitive."

His students will tell you that the best thing about one of Wood's courses "is Alan himself." He receives rave reviews for "fascinating" and authoritative lectures that stimulate conversation and challenge students to think in new ways. Underlying his approach and his message is a belief that human experience is and has always been deeply interrelated.

"I'm guided by a basic ecological and Confucian principal of reciprocity: Everything is connected to everything else," explains Wood, who earned his bachelor's degree in Asian Studies at the University of Oregon and later spent a year learning Mandarin Chinese in Taipei, China. He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in 1981.

Ten years spent outside of academia inspired Wood to bridge the gap between the scholarly world of the professor and the practical world of the general public. His courses in Asian and world history as well as his research address the most fundamental problems facing the modern world. "I've designed my courses to bring the broadest possible perspective of human experience to bear on contemporary issues," he says.

Wood is a strong proponent of interdisciplinary education and encourages his students to think in terms of context and connections. Says former student David Bottem, "While some professors focus only on transmitting factual knowledge or vocational skills, Professor Wood provides his students with a framework for exploring the world's complexities." This framework draws on science to enrich global history. At the beginning of each course, Wood introduces students to systems theory, or holistic thinking. "It offers us a way to unify widely ranging phenomena into a coherent story," he says.

The story he's helping to tell is our own — the story of human beings, past and present. From the bow of a ship Alan Wood first perceived that people around the world and throughout history are more similar than different, and that their lives are intertwined. "We need new ideas and institutions that reflect human capacity for long-term cooperation and community," he says. By arming his students with the intellectual tools to observe and interpret events around them, Wood hopes to build the foundations of a responsible, viable global civil society, one person at a time. And for him, it's a joy.

"Getting to know students, thinking about the great issues of our day together is so much fun I sometimes marvel at how I actually contrived to be paid for this job," he says. "It's almost too good to be true."

– Jennifer Amend

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Posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X greet visitors to David Allen's office. Not what you'd expect to see in a white man's office in the School of Nursing. He also surprises some who walk into Feminist Methodologies class expecting a woman in front of the room.

But Allen, a philosopher turned nurse turned devoted professor, is determined to create a different environment — and perspective — for his students.

Despite his skill as a lecturer, he prefers to use group learning exercises and active discussions that force students to truly process ideas and think through difficult issues in social justice, inquiry, theory and nursing.

Allen's classes draw students from diverse corners of campus, and they don't just take one of his classes — they collect them all.

"I think he walks on water," gushes education doctoral student Robin Diangelo, a five-time veteran of his courses. "I leave his classes feeling like my brain is on fire about things I truly care about. I'm intellectually stimulated about things that matter, not just to me, but I believe to the world. There's nothing like it."

Since joining the UW in 1988, Allen, professor of psychosocial and community health, has held an adjunct appointment in women studies. In addition to various methodologies courses, one of his longstanding offerings is White Privilege and Racism in Health and Human Services, commonly known as "Whiteness."

Last year, he created a new course called Who Am I Here? Difference and Identity at UW to help incoming freshmen adjust to their new environment and encounters with more or different forms of diversity.

Whether he's sending quarterly e-mails to follow up with freshmen about the adjustment to university life, or holding pivotal sessions with doctoral students at his kitchen table, Allen's priority is always his students' education. Midway through his classes, along come the evaluations, both peer evaluations — students evaluate themselves as group members — as well as professor evaluations, to ensure that everyone's needs are met.

"Teaching is a practice, like any devotional practice," Allen says. "So it is about figuring out how to be present to as many people and ideas at any moment as I can, and knowing that every single time you will fail."

Doris Boutain, a former student who is now on the nursing faculty at Seattle University, says: "What makes him different from other teachers is that he is sincerely interested in cultivating excellence. He is not just doing a job, he is living a dream of developing knowledge with others. His passion, compassion and openness are characteristics that make him truly remarkable."

Allen served as a department chair in the School of Nursing for 10 years, but every time he got the chance, he added more teaching to his schedule. The list of courses he's taught over his career ranges from theater, philosophy and art history to medical-surgery, neonatal intensive care and neurological intensive care. "Some environments are easier than others, but being with students is the point," he says.

With 30 years of teaching experience behind him, his great respect for students and the learning process guide his teaching style.

In his classrooms people practice, rather than acquire, Allen says. "I try to think how to get myself and the students aligned against the content, rather than have the content as something between me and the students. I am always thinking about how to create working space in which we are working together on some project, application or interpretation, rather than them demonstrating their work to me."

That learning environment translates into success for students.

"He has made me grow intellectually in unpredictable and remarkable ways that I never thought I could," says Maureen West, a doctoral student in nursing who has taken nearly all of his courses. "He encourages me to raise difficult issues without feeling intimidated. He transforms the classroom into an open intellectual place where we talk and share perspectives. He gives us academic and intellectual tools to achieve like no teacher I have ever had."

– Lia Unrau

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Look up Ann Baker's name in the online faculty-staff directory and you will see she is listed as a senior lecturer in philosophy. Though at times that might seem like a tenuous track, the position fits her desire to make teaching, rather than research and writing, her primary focus.

So it seems only fitting that her commitment to the classroom has earned for her a 2004 UW Distinguished Teaching Award.

Baker, a Spokane native, earned a bachelor's degree at Eastern Washington University in Cheney and came to the UW for her graduate work, earning her doctorate in 1990. She was an instructor at the UW and the University of Puget Sound before landing a spot as an assistant professor at Illinois' Wesleyan University in 1990.

After four years at the Bloomington, Ill., campus, she returned to the UW as a senior lecturer, a position for which she recently signed her third five-year contract.

"It was pretty scary to move from a tenure-track position back to this kind of position that doesn't have the security," she said. "At the first five-year contract renewal I was really nervous. I'm a lot more comfortable with it now. This award isn't tenure, but it is a lot of job security when you're on a job track like mine."

Baker was married and already had a child when she decided to return to school. She found that she was "in love with the world of ideas," but she chose philosophy almost by accident. In fact, she says, "it picked me." She had two courses the same quarter — general philosophy and philosophy of religion — and was hooked.

"I thought, ‘Finally I found a group of people who ask the questions I ask, who aren't satisfied with the easy answers.'"

She has tried to bring that same feeling to the classes she teaches, giving students new ways of seeing things, instilling critical and creative thinking.

"From the first day of class, I could see that Ann was a great teacher because she seemed so focused on us, the students, and our learning," wrote Brooks Miner, who went on to become the 2003 President's Medalist.

"Ann always made it clear to us that the best way to learn was to express our ideas and defend them, no matter what the ideas were," he wrote. "When we did express our ideas, Ann would argue with us in a way that would stimulate our thinking and our understanding. This kind of debate was the ideal way to learn philosophy."

Colleagues too give her high marks. When Angela Smith came to the UW as an assistant philosophy professor in the fall of 1999, she had the opportunity to sit in on Baker's Philosophy 100 course. Smith had never taught more than 25 students at a time and was looking for ideas of how to approach the large lecture class she would have to teach the following spring.

"She made a classroom of over 200 students feel like a small lecture hall of 30, by asking engaging questions and actively encouraging her students to participate in finding answers to them," Smith wrote. "Through skillful and creative questioning, she worked through a number of key philosophical concepts (argument, premise, conclusion, defense of/objection to a premise) in a way that was both fun for the students and ensured that they really understood these basics of philosophical argumentation."

Baker acknowledges that the challenge in her biggest classes is to reproduce the sort of "come think with me about these problems" environment that exists in the small upper-level classes.

Only a small fraction of the students Baker sees will make philosophy a major, and many of them are likely to be double majors headed for careers such as law. She knows the majority of students in her introductory classes will never take another philosophy course.

"But if they do what I ask them to do, they will think more philosophically, more critically, more imaginatively, and that can stay with them the rest of their lives."

– Vince Stricherz

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The shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line. For example, consider the story of one of this year's distinguished teaching award winners, Tessa Evans-Campbell.

College, let alone teaching social work at the university level, was not on her radar screen earlier in her life when she dropped out of high school. But since she set her focus on teaching, Evans-Campbell certainly has made her mark as an educator, mentor and researcher in just three years at the UW. Consider what Dorothy Van Soest, dean of the School of Social Work, wrote in nominating her for the teaching award:

"She is already a master teacher with a unique ability to combine passion, commitment, scholarship and life experience as a Snohomish native woman in her work with students. It is incredibly powerful! As one of her faculty colleagues said, she is a ‘rising star' who is already distinguished."

Although her students toss such laudatory adjectives as "awesome," "amazing," "fabulous" and "extraordinary" in their descriptions of her courses, Evans-Campbell was not a born teacher.

"During my first quarter here I would hyper-prepare for my classes. I would stay up all night and that led to a lot of stress," she said. "I needed to learn how to let my teaching flow. Part of the magic of the classroom is what just pops up and following the lead of students."

Some of that flow evolved from the birth her second daughter who was later diagnosed with the neurological disorder Tourette's syndrome "I realized I couldn't take care of my daughter and stay up all night preparing for a class. She helped me appreciate the ambiguities in life and to be flexible."

Others have helped her along the way as well. She attended Seattle Central Community College after dropping out of high school and a counselor there encouraged her to apply to the UW, where she became fascinated by art history. Later, as she was working on a master's degree in child welfare at UCLA, Karina Walters and Jane Simoni, now UW professorial colleagues, encouraged her to seek her doctorate.

As a consequence Evans-Campbell does a lot of mentoring both inside and outside the classroom. "From my own experience I understand how important it can be for them. A lot of students don't even think about getting a master's degree or their doctorate," she said

In the classroom, she wants her students to begin to understand their own framework for social work practice and to be able to deal with ambiguity.

"I want students to have the critical thinking skills so they can apply the relevant theoretical framework and are able to question their practice," she said. "But even more important, they need to know that sometimes there are no pat answers, that they have to be able to embrace ambiguity and then deal with it critically. This is very powerful for students to learn."

In addition, her teaching has a multicultural perspective and looks at historical trauma, two leitmotifs of her research. ("Historical trauma," as Evans-Campbell defines it, is a massive cumulative trauma such as the Holocaust, the World War II Japanese internment camps or the boarding schools to which generations of Americans were sent.) She believes that because American society is diverse it is important for social work students to come away with a multicultural perspective.

"I teach about historical trauma and it is important for students to understand that people have different lenses through which they look at life. This kind of trauma is intergenerational and can affect you and your family even if you didn't personally experience it," she said.

Evans-Campbell's research is aimed at Indian child welfare and the impact of historical trauma on caretaking, families, parenting and welfare. High on her personal list of achievements has been the creation of two centers. One, the Native Wellness Center at the School of Social Work, is involved in one training and seven research projects and the other, the Center for Intergenerational Indigenous Health and Child Welfare Research, is collaborating with researchers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the American Southwest.

– Joel Schwarz

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The cool light of a typically overcast Seattle morning shines through the tall windows of a Meany Hall dance studio as Elizabeth "Betsy" Cooper takes students in her Dance 303a class, called Intermediate-Advanced Ballet Technique, though their choreographed routines.

Cooper, an associate professor, is the director of the UW Dance Program, but she brings no lofty administrative airs into the studio or classroom. Here, clad in a black leotard, longish hair tied back, she seems more a mentor, the first among equals. What she asks of the students she herself deftly demonstrates first. Then it's their turn.

"That was so much better — beautiful" she says when they're done. She rearranges their positions slightly on the floor ("so there will be no collisions") and works through another series of moves, counting the beats out as she goes along, eyes on the mirrored wall they all face.

Cooper dances along with her students, but she is every bit a teacher. And though it might have surprised the Betsy Cooper of two decades back — a talented young New York ballet dancer with her eyes on performance — she has come to love teaching almost as much as dance itself. The way those feelings shine through on a morning like this is a powerful reason why Cooper was named one of the UW's Distinguished Teaching Award winners for 2004.

The dancers know the choreography; they've been working on the routine in class all week. As they sweep across the studio floor and leap into the air in groups of four — seemingly weightless with grace, athleticism and youth — an uninhibited grin spreads across Cooper's face.

"Well, that was fun!" she says brightly. "I hope you had fun, because I had fun watching!" The students smile even as they fuss over stretched muscles or movements that felt slightly off. Cooper briefly stands alongside one girl and softly advises her on mechanics of posture and balance.

It isn't crucial to Cooper which of these dancers is bound for a professional career, at least not at this stage. "When we are in the studio we are dancers, plain and simple," she says. "Just as they have individual goals, I have teaching objectives for the class that are more general and specific ones for students based on their needs."

The students, in turn, clearly appreciate Cooper's accessible style of teaching, and it shows in the letters supporting her nomination for the teaching award. Kelly Knox, a former student, poetically summed up Cooper's spark saying, "Her sheer joy for the art form makes the grueling effort toward perfection a pleasure."

Knox also praised Cooper for a willingness to help in even the most informal setting: "I consider the depth of my graduate education to be those moments in the hallway when I would catch Betsy to ask her advice or seek her wisdom."

Back in the studio on this gray morning, Cooper finishes instructions for a routine when a student speaks up, saying, basically, "Wait, that's not how you had it before." A more rule-bound professor might bristle at being corrected by a student, but Cooper thinks it through, admits she has made a change and cheerfully moves on.

The easy attitude and the openness to students create a comfortable studio environment. But Cooper — perhaps the only dance professor extant with a bachelor's degree in archeological studies from Yale — is equally comfortable in a lecture hall teaching dance history as in a dance studio. In fact, she says she likes and needs both settings.

Over the years, as dance student, then an archeology student, then professional dancer and finally professor, Cooper has come to grips with what she said has at times been "a love-hate relationship" with dance, having teetered once and finally toward the "love" side. It shows in the studio, where this serious art form is polished with an educator's light touch of patience and support.

"I encourage the students to bring a playfulness to class, to challenge themselves," she said. There are high standards in the codified world of dance, to be sure, "but if they can't have fun in class while they're working hard, to me that's lamentable. You have to find the joy in life."

– Peter Kelley

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Here are the three reasons why political science professor Stephen Hanson won a 2004 Distinguished Teaching Award:

1. He gives each lecture a "storyline" that hooks students into following the "soap opera" to the end.

2. He imparts to young students his own fascination with the "big puzzle of the world we're living in."

3. He uses time-tested teaching tricks — such as presenting facts in lists of three.

"Lists of two and four just don't work as well," Hanson admits. "For some reason, the mind can follow groups of three."

If that sounds like a reductionist gloss on the art of teaching, it's hard to argue with the accolades the Harvard- and Berkeley-educated Hanson has earned since joining the UW faculty 14 years ago.

An expert in Russia and Eastern Europe, Hanson influences generations of UW undergraduates through his Introduction to Comparative Politics, where in 10 weeks he promises roomsful of 300 freshmen something like an overview of world politics.

"It's not so scary when you tell them there are only 191 countries in the UN," Hanson says. "In high school, they probably had to know something about all 50 states — this is only four times more!"

Those numbers, again.

Descriptive explanations for Hanson's success have to come from his students, some of whom call him "the best teacher I ever had" or "the reason I decided to major in poli sci."

Candace Faber, one such political science major (along with slavic studies and literature), noticed right away that she had to get to Hanson's class early to find a seat near the front.

"In the average lecture classroom," she observes in her award-nomination letter, "the room is rarely full outside test days. The students congregate toward the back, where mid-lecture dozing is easier to hide."

The Hanson difference, Faber writes, is the way his lectures engage students, making them laugh and "lighting idea bulbs."

This mesmerizing podiumship comes in a low-key package. Hanson, who looks like a younger, trimmer and less-sarcastic Bill Murray, rarely raises his voice — logic itself somehow delivers an electric thrill.

"It's intriguing, intellectually, to figure out how human beings create social power," Hanson says. "Luckily, since we have only 10 weeks for the introductory course, there's not an infinite number of types of regimes in the world."

While prowess in the lecture hall brings Hanson what political science chairman Stephen Majeski calls "unbelievable student evaluations," Hanson draws equal praise from the graduate students whose contact with him is in seminars and one-on-one.

Jonathan Carver describes in a nominating letter how Hanson encourages grad students toward their individual paths, frequently offering career-specific contacts and ideas.

"Steve treats all students — from undergraduates to doctoral candidates — as colleagues," Carver writes.

For his part, Hanson credits one of his own mentors, UC Berkeley political scientist Ken Jowitt, for imparting the sense of narrative and other teaching techniques. Others who left their mark include Hanson's parents: his mother, who taught early-childhood education, and his father, who taught high school driver's education.

The passion for teaching, of course, is intertwined with passion for the subject. As director of the Jackson School's Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Center, Hanson enjoys launching students toward globally oriented careers in government, academia, business and nonprofits.

His interest in Russia sprang from his love of the language, but it flowered during graduate study in the period when the Soviet empire was collapsing in the late 1980s.

"It's just another example," Hanson said, "of the big puzzle of the world we're living in."

Now, for the three reasons the Soviet empire collapsed…

– Steven Goldsmith

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For Beth Kalikoff, teaching transcends the present.

In any 10-week quarter, students will learn volumes from their professor. It's what they take with them after the term, however, that can really change their lives, according to Kalikoff.

"I'm interested in what happens after the class is over," Kalikoff said. "I want students to learn things that will have meaning after they graduate."

Kalikoff, an assistant professor who teaches writing in UWT's Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program, said she designs her teaching to improve students' abilities as writers and scholars and enhance their abilities to become informed, engaged citizens.

"My courses support active and lifelong learning," she said. "The courses support the development of a student's abilities as well as the products of those abilities."

A faculty nominator wrote that Kalikoff exemplifies the spirit of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

"Dr. Kalikoff is truly brilliant in front of a class. She has a sparkling and engaging personality and she spreads her enthusiasm for literature and writing like a contagion."

Kalikoff has been a senior lecturer at UWT since 1998, teaching courses in argument, writing and American studies. Previously, she was an associate professor at the University of Puget Sound and assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University. She holds a doctorate and M.A. in English from Indiana University and a B.A. in English from Johns Hopkins University.

Before she began teaching full time at UWT, Kalikoff developed UWT's first campuswide writing center and recruited and taught about 40 peer consultants who offered hundreds of undergraduate and graduate in-class presentations on writing.

Kalikoff was named an assistant professor just this year. She focuses her service on teaching and learning and frequently sponsors faculty development workshops for colleagues. In addition, she is well known in the IAS program for her efforts to create "linked" courses with other disciplines. With Kima Cargill, she is currently studying the effects on students' grades of linking courses across disciplines.

Kalikoff says that each course she teaches develops uniquely as students react to her leadership.

"I relish the noisy and sometimes untidy learning opportunities that teaching provides," she says. "Every group of students changes your teaching."

Many UWT students are older and more experienced than traditional college students, Kalikoff said.

"Most UWT students have jumped a lot of hurdles to get here," she said. "They're determined to get as much out of their education as they can, and they're not shy about telling me how I can help them do that."

The faculty member who nominated Kalikoff said she is constantly adjusting her method of teaching.

"Rather than rehashing the same material year after year, she transforms herself and has become a ‘master teacher,'" the faculty member said. "I have never known a teacher who can equal Professor Kalikoff in her capacity to inspire excellence in her students."

– Jill Carnell

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