SACC 2012 Student Award for Academic Excellence

Ember Knight, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, California

Ember’s paper is titled “It’s an Addiction: Identity, Community, and Gender in Los Angeles Open Mic Comedy.” Her professor, Dr. Sohini Ray, submitted her paper for nomination. Ember will be presenting her paper at the 2012 SACC annual conference in San Diego in April.

SACC 2011 Student Award for Academic Excellence

Danielle Emond, University of South Dakota, Vermillion

Danielle’s paper was titled “The Process of Fan Fiction: Creating Culture though Alternate Realities.” Danielle is an anthropology major and her professor, Dona Davis, submitted the paper on her behalf. Danielle presented a talk on this topic at the 2011 annual meeting of SACC in Omaha, Nebraska. Congratulations!

SACC 2010 Teacher of the Year Awards

Laura Gonzalez of San Diego Miramar College, San Diego, CA

Tad McIlwraith of Douglas College, New Westminster, BC, Canada

Laura Gonzalez and
Tad McIlwraith

The SACC Awards Committee received nominations for two outstanding candidates who are considered exceptional by their peers and students as teachers, colleagues, and confidents. After careful and thoughtful deliberation the Awards Committee felt that the best and most fair decision was to recognize BOTH Laura Gonzalez of San Diego Miramar College in San Diego, CA, and Tad McIlwraith of Douglas College, New Westminster, BC, Canada, for the Teachers of the Year award. This award comes to each of them with a $500 prize and registration waiver to the 2010 SACC annual meeting.

The nomination materials received by the Awards Committee for Laura and Tad were most impressive, expressing their great enthusiasm for teaching and for their students and in so many words their boundless energy in pursuing their professional interests. Laura and Tad possess sensitivity, creativity, and connectivity in teaching students of diverse backgrounds; inspire, challenge, and maintain thoughtful communication with their students in and out of the classroom; generously share their teaching experiences with colleagues; and are committed to sharing their enthusiasm for the field of anthropology to those within and outside the discipline, and in making a significant difference within their respective communities.

Student letters were part of the nomination materials for Laura. Their letters wrote of Laura as being an approachable, creative and engaging teacher who has had a positive influence on their lives. One student remarked that her classes “are very 2010. She uses a mix of PowerPoint lectures, her prized skull and bone collections, and field trips to share her knowledge with each class.” Another wrote that “Professor Gonzalez consistently provides opportunity for community college students by encouraging honors course work, scholarship and student participation on campus.”

Laura has taken on the responsibility of being the de facto spokesperson for anthropology on her campus, educating faculty with seminars on how to answer students’ questions about evolution and on the significance of new finds such as Ardipithecus. Laura’s fund raising abilities has enabled her to secure $20,000 to build up the college’s physical anthropology collection. She also obtained funding for an organic garden on campus. She is co-chair of the Environmental Stewardship Taskforce at her college and established the Miramar College Food and Culture Club. This is no surprise to SACC members who have accompanied Laura to SACC restaurant dinners and heard her go over the menu and talk about food with gusto.

We can speak just as enthusiastically for Tad. We received strong letters of support from Tad’s colleagues who expressed his innovative and sensitive approaches to teaching students of different academic skills and learning needs. One colleague wrote how Tad used oral traditions in his First Nations of British Columbia course as a way to frame each lecture. This resonated with and enthralled students who did not hesitate to ask questions or add their own interpretations and observations, which Tad welcomed. He inspired one of his students on academic probation to make the Dean’s honor role.

Tad is technologically savvy and uses social media such as blogs, websites, and twitter to ease communication with students and colleagues and to track current events to help students understand anthropology’s relevance in today’s world. Some of his teaching material, which is available online, led to a recent communication from one new teacher who wrote to say how helpful she found his detailed instruction for a course and would be incorporating it for her class as it would better communicate the material to her students.

Tad also makes important contributions to the regional community that help raise awareness of Native culture and issues and the role anthropology can play. He organized a speaker series on aboriginal reconciliation, designs programs to assist native researchers working in their home communities, including introducing them to research methods; and maintains his own research programs on the First Nations in addition to teaching eight courses a year.

Laura and Tad’s passion for their careers can also be noted by their vision for continuing to improve upon their activities and breadth of their teaching. Laura plans to create an archaeology course once the California budget recovers and Tad was asked by a First Nation’s community to start a field school and bring Douglas students to live on their reserve. He is hopeful the first session will take place in 2011.

SACC is very proud to have identified two outstanding and worthy teachers, both SACC members, to be recognized by our community. We wish them continued success.

2010 Awards Committee

Ann Kaupp, chair

Beverly Bennett

Dianne Chidester

Nikki Ives