Late last spring, Wabash On My Mind podcast host Richard Paige interviewed Associate Professor Michele Pittard, this year’s winner of the College’s highest honor for faculty—the McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Excellence in Teaching Award.

Some moments from their conversation:

You were an English major in college. Where did the love of the written word come from for you?
Pittard: I was always a reader as a kid, but also a writer. I kept a journal from a very early time in my life, and so, I think it came partially from my mom, who was also a reader. My grandmother on my dad’s side was a kindergarten teacher and I can remember reading with her.

But writing has always been a part of my life. Personal journaling—and I’m a big letter writer too. I still like to write letters to people.

What do you think makes the liberal arts a good way for students to prepare to be teachers?
A teacher, no matter what your discipline is, benefits from the understanding and appreciation of other disciplines and seeing the connections between them.

But it’s also the skills that come along with a liberal arts education. I want teachers to be able to problem-solve in the classroom. They have to be able to think critically about their students’ needs, and they also need to be open to the diversity that they will see in whatever school they end up in.

I think all those things are nurtured and facilitated in the liberal arts setting.

What do you think are the essential characteristics of a good teacher?
I think people have to really love—they have to have a passion for something. It either has to be a passion for making an impact on young people or a passion for the content. Teaching is too hard at any level and too important at any level to go into it without that passion.

You need to be in a stance of caring. Just caring about your students, caring enough to be prepared, caring enough to design lessons and activities and assignments that are relevant to them and will help them grow.

One of the biggest surprises our students encounter in the teaching experience is how difficult this is. When you’re a student in a class and you have a good teacher in front of you, it just looks so easy. In the Education minor and in the certification program, we sort of take students behind the scenes to see the work. And then they realize this really is difficult.

What one piece of advice would you give beginning teachers?
I tell my students that you have to make a human connection with your students. Building that rapport with them, building that relationship with your students, is the first thing. From there, everything else becomes a lot easier.
You have taught some fascinating freshman tutorials: Dean Scott Feller has praised you for your commitment to our all-college courses, your work on the Enduring Questions course.
Teaching freshmen is a real gift, because sometimes you end up having those same freshmen as seniors in a course, and that’s so cool. You forget about how much students develop from freshman year to senior year.

I know you enjoy working on your golf game, and you write young adult novels, among other things. What do you enjoy about the writing process that you don’t get anywhere else?

Oh, it’s surprising. You can go into a writing project, whether it’s a novel or a paper or a letter, with an idea of what you want to say and what the story is and where you want to go, but the writing process itself is so generative and it spawns things that you just can’t imagine happening. And if you can be comfortable with that ambiguity and that process, it can lead you. You let the writing take you where it’s going to go. If you can allow yourself to get immersed in that, it’s surprising.

And it’s fun.

Listen to the entire interview at Wabash On My Mind on the Wabash Web site.

Michele Pittard, a 15-year teaching veteran at Wabash College, received the McLain-McTurnan-Arnold Excellence in Teaching Award, announced at the College’s Awards Chapel, the annual honors convocation, in April.

Pittard, an Associate Professor of Education Studies, is also the director of the secondary licensure program at the liberal arts college in Crawfordsville.

According to Dean of the College Scott E. Feller, “Michele’s impact on the campus is not limited to the classroom or office hours. She supports our students in all their endeavors, support that continues after they graduate as they go on to impact the lives of their own students. It is fair to say she touches the lives of every Wabash student through her tireless commitment to our all-college courses. She is a faculty leader who strengthens the College in important ways.”

The Excellence in Teaching Award honors the memories of Reid H. McLain ’27, Clair McTurnan ’10, and Kent Arnold ’29, and has been given annually to a member of the faculty who has distinguished him or herself by innovative and engaging teaching since 1965.

“A good teacher is always learning and always seeking to improve his or her practice,” Pittard said. “Receiving this award will continue to motivate me in that way, as if walking into a classroom full of students isn’t enough motivation. I consider myself kind of a blue-collar academic because I consider teaching the most important part of my work. So it was nice to receive acknowledgement for the work I do every day, especially as a teacher-educator, it was really special.”

Pittard joined the Wabash faculty in 2002 after completing a bachelor’s degree in English from Butler University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Adolescent Literacy from Purdue University. Prior to joining the Wabash faculty, Pittard was a high school English teacher for four years.

In addition to working with student teachers every semester, Dr. Pittard has taught nearly every class in the Education Department. Outside of her department, she regularly teaches freshman tutorials and Enduring Questions, where she currently serves as faculty-chair of the freshman courses committee.

Active with and committed to the scholarship of teaching and learning, Dr. Pittard’s research projects include: examining the relationship between liberal arts education and teacher preparation and classroom-based research for pre-service teachers.

“At a college that values teaching above all, Michele is a teacher of teachers,” Feller said in presenting the prestigious award. “At a college where everyone – faculty, staff, and coaches – see themselves as resources, our colleague’s students routinely describe her as their most important mentor.”

She has been a regular presenter at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and in collaboration with her former colleague in education, Dr. Deborah Butler, she co-edited and contributed a chapter to a monograph entitled, “Liberal arts education and teacher education: A lasting relationship,” and co-wrote an article published in MoutainRise, an online journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, entitled, “Creating and supporting mixed-level inquiry communities.”

She helped design and has lead the department’s immersion trip to Chicago for students in the education studies minor to experience education in an urban setting, a trip that has become an integral part of education students’ experience. The Education Department decided to move the urban immersion experience to Memphis, and Pittard is currently planning the first trip there for Spring, 2018.

“Our students learn that even if our backgrounds as teachers are different from our backgrounds of the students we have in class, we can build a relationship with them,” she said. “We can acknowledge those differences, we can celebrate those differences, and take advantage of those differences to learn about each other. As teachers we set the tone, we begin this process of building relationships with our students.”

Outside the classroom, Pittard remains in pursuit of her goals, ranging from writing a young adult novel to improving her golf game.

Wabash College Dean and Professor of Chemistry Scott Feller was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in June to study a protein involved in the initial steps of vision.

The five-year, $511,500 grant covers the research work for Feller and students as they examine the effect of lipids containing polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids on the membrane-protein interface. Receipt of this grant ensures 22 years of continuous NSF support for this project, which coincides with Feller’s arrival on campus in 1998.

The study focuses largely on a protein, Rhodopsin, which is found in the retina of your eye. It is the protein that absorbs the photon of light, the first step in vision. The research attempts to understand how the vision process is influenced by the cellular membrane and, in particular, the role of omega-3 fatty acids.

“Omega-3 fatty acids are found in high concentrations in your retina, basically the highest concentrations found in the human body are found there. We’re interested as to why that is,” said Feller. “There are broader scientific implications because this protein is a member of a very large class of proteins that have similar structures. If we understood Rhodopsin, we would understand something about a class of proteins that are very important pharmacologically.”

The second part of this NSF funding is the impact on student education, as the grant will support three student interns each year. The support not only covers work and new equipment in laboratories, but also allows for those students to travel to professional meetings and conferences.

In addition to Wabash students, the research program also includes collaboration with a handful of researchers off campus.

The continuation of Feller’s work, this project titled, “Atomic Modelling of Membrane Proteins,” enables him to maintain both scholarship and teaching while handling the responsibilities of the Dean of the College. To date, the research has produced more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.

“I think it’s important for the Dean of the College to be engaged with his or her discipline because we are asking faculty members to do the same thing,” Feller said. “They have many teaching and service responsibilities on this campus, but we still ask faculty to remain active in their disciplines and to continue to make contributions so that they are actively engaged. I don’t see it differently for me.”

Much of Feller’s research is in computer modeling, so he feels fortunate to receive extended funding and to work closely with scientists throughout the field.

“It was a huge relief to receive this type of extended funding, especially given the tight funding of the last decade,” Feller said. “I have ridden the increasing power and decreasing cost of computers over the last few decades, which has worked very well. I’ve have a lot of really good collaborators – both students at Wabash and professionals off campus.”

This grant will fund research through May 2020.

A textbook published in October by three Wabash professors and a former teacher at the College offers a new approach to public speaking that ties it directly to civic engagement and participation in democracy.

Public Speaking and Democratic Participation: Speech, Deliberation, and Analysis in the Civic Realm was written by Wabash Professors of Rhetoric Jennifer Abbot and Todd McDorman, Assistant Professor of English Jill Lamberton, and Monmouth Professor David Timmerman, who taught at Wabash for more than a decade.

The book was published by Oxford University Press, which describes it as “a unique introductory textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to the basic skills involved in public speaking—including reasoning, organization, outlining, anxiety management, style, delivery, and more—through the lens of democratic participation. act of civic participation.

“By integrating the theme of civic engagement throughout, Public Speaking and Democratic Participation offers a direct and inspiring response to the alarming decline in civic participation in the U.S. and the climate of vindictiveness in our current political culture.”

As reviewer and Penn State University Professor Lyn J. Freymiller put it:  “The authors suggest that the endeavor of good speaking has a lot to do with being a responsible citizen in society. The book returns to this idea throughout and appropriately ties concepts back to this notion of taking responsibility for our communication.”

Professor of Religion Robert Royalty’s book The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity was published in paperback in June.

Originally published in hardcover in 2012, the book focuses on heresy as a central concept in the formation of Orthodox Christianity. It traces the construction of the idea of ‘heresy’ in the rhetoric of ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric against ‘heretics,’ called heresiology.

Royalty argues that one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled ‘heresy’ in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as ‘heresy’ in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called ‘heresy.’ And by the end of the first century, the notion of heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of other Christian communities.

Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Jeff Drury presented “The Rhetoric of Rogue Ethos: Chris Christie’s Swing from ‘Boss’ to ‘Bully,’” at the Central States Communication Association Convention in Madison, WI in April. The presentation mirrored the essay he published in November 2014 in the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.

The article and presentation looked at how Christie’s existing rogue ethos may have hurt his damage control efforts in the wake of the George Washington Bridge scandal because his arguments in that context centered on personal feelings of embarrassment and shame rather than public values of republican leadership.