Rutherford will receive $5,000 through a grant from Charles B. and Mary Jo Locke Hedrick. The award is named in honor of Charles Hedrick’s father, Charles E. Hedrick, a former history professor and later chairman of the Graduate Council, and one of the founders of Marshall’s graduate program.
Marshall’s Center for Teaching and Learning today announced the Hedrick Award and three others – including one new one – honoring five faculty members. They are:
Marshall & Shirley Reynolds Outstanding Teacher Award: Dr. Greta Rensenbrink, an associate professor in the history department.
Pickens-Queen Teacher Award: Dr. Damien Arthur, an associate professor of Political Science; Dr. Carrie Oeding, an assistant professor in the English department, and, Dr. Michael Schroeder, an assistant professor of Mathematics.
The new Council of Chairs Award for Excellence in Teaching: Anna Rollins, an English instructor.
Here is a brief look at the awards and the winners:
Charles E. Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award
This award recognizes a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has a minimum of seven years teaching experience at Marshall and has a record of outstanding classroom teaching, scholarship, research and creative activities.
Dr. Phillip T. Rutherford has been teaching history at Marshall since August 2006, when he was hired as an assistant professor. He is known for his “highly refined sense of humor,” according to co-worker Dr. Bill Palmer, and his teaching style is described as “conversational.”
“He is one of the best appointments the history department has ever made,” Palmer said.
Dr. Montserrat Miller, another history professor at Marshall, recalls when Rutherford was hired and the impression he made. “One thing became enormously clear to the search committee and the department of history as a whole,” Miller said. “His competitors for the job did not stand a chance so long as Dr. Rutherford would be willing to take the position.”
Rutherford earned his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Southern Maine in 1987 and his Ph.D. in history from Penn State University in 2001. His primary field was Modern European History, 1500-present.
Palmer said Rutherford well deserves the Hedrick Award.
“The Hedrick Award specifies that the nominee be judged on both teaching and research, and Dr. Rutherford excels at both,” Palmer said. “The quality of Dr. Rutherford’s teaching is exceptionally high. In the spring of 2008, he was honored as one of the winners of Marshall’s Pickens-Queen Teacher Award. The student ratings of Dr. Rutherford’s teaching have been consistently high. By my rough calculation, over eighty percent of Dr. Rutherford’s students would recommend him to others.”
Dr. Daniel Holbrook, chair of the history department, said Rutherford “clearly represents the very best attributes of a faculty member; he is devoted equally to helping his students gain the knowledge and skills that will make them better citizens and better people and to adding substantially and substantively to our body of knowledge about human history.”
MU history professor Dr. David Mills said he believes Rutherford is among the top 10 professors at Marshall.
“Dr. Rutherford is an organized, prepared, knowledgeable and demanding professor of modern European history, but also the most popular professor in the department,” Mills said. “I have never heard a negative comment about his teaching from a student or faculty observer.”
Holbrook added, “His classes are not fancy firework shows throwing off more heat than light, but are considered exhibition of command of the material, attention to student strengths, weaknesses, and needs, and the establishment of an atmosphere reflecting respect for learning. As the peer observations make clear, Phil knows and respects his students and elicits from them their best efforts. His students recognize his skills and goals as these comments from the Fall of 2015 indicate: ‘Dr. Rutherford is one of the best professors I’ve ever had. Almost every day I left his class with new ideas and new interests that I was eager to explore further on my own through additional readings and online research,’ and, ‘Dr. Rutherford keeps students invested, painting realistic portraits of the periods about which he teaches. He relates everything back to current trends, keeping history relevant.’”
Marshall and Shirley Reynolds Outstanding Teacher Award
This award includes a $3,000 stipend, and all tenured or tenure-track faculty members who have completed six or more years of service at Marshall are eligible.
Dr. Greta Rensenbrink has been teaching at Marshall since 2006, when she was hired as an assistant professor in the history department. At MU, she was the founding director of Sexuality Studies from 2008 to 2010, and director of Women’s Studies from 2010 to 2013.
Rensenbrink earned her B.A. in United States history in May 1993 from the University of Massachusetts, her master’s in history in August 1998 from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in history, also from the University of Chicago, in August 2003.
Rensenbrink said she believes “historical inquiry begins with textual analysis, and that is the bedrock of what I teach students. The ability to interpret historical sources, put them into larger historical context, and think creatively about what kinds of stories about the past they can help us to tell, are skills critical to historical thinking and also translatable to students’ lives inside and outside the university.
“In the largest conceptual frame, what I want students to learn in my classes is that history can reveal to us the instabilities and possibilities inherent in the present. History roots and grounds where we are, but also shows us how the seeming inevitabilities in the world around us are not so inevitable. I want them to see the past not as a dry and dusty place but as a source of hope for the present and the future.”
Dr. Laura Michele Diener, an associate professor of history at Marshall, says Rensenbrink has always been her mentor at Marshall, both in history and in women’s studies, of which she now is the director.
“She encouraged me to view my students as partners in my various interests and to harness their intellectual energy for activism beyond the classroom. She has also pushed me to develop interdisciplinary and beyond-the-box courses as she herself has done. When I think of the kind of teacher I hope to be, I immediately think of Greta Rensenbrink.”
Holbrook said that in recent years, Rensenbrink “has taken a leading role in helping to revise our senior capstone course and our sophomore methods workshop – two of the hardest courses to teach and the two crucial ones for students to succeed in.”
“It is abundantly clear that Greta has the respect of her department colleagues.”
Rensenbrink, in addition to her teaching, is the producer of the series Body Shots: A Multimedia Experience of Visual and Vocal Discussion, which one faculty member referred to as “a Marshall University tradition.”
Pickens-Queen Teacher Award
Each of these three award winners receives a $1,000 stipend. The award honors outstanding junior faculty. All faculty members teaching on a full-time, tenured or tenure track appointment who have completed one to five years of service at Marshall are eligible.
Dr. Damien Arthur has been at Marshall since 2014, when he was hired as an assistant professor of public administration in the department of political science.
“I do not see my role in the classroom as facilitating in the accumulation of factoids that reinforce what one already thinks about various issues,” he said. “I do not teach them how to be good Liberals or Conservatives or stereotypical Democrats or Republicans. I see my role as similar to what Aristotle once famously stated: ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ To me, partially, this notion expresses the concept of critical thinking.”
Arthur earned his B.A. in theological studies from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, in 2004; his M.T.S. in religion and culture from Boston University in 2006; his Master of Public Administration (M.P.A.) from West Virginia University in 2008; his M.A. in American public policy from WVU in 2010; and, his Ph.D. in political science from WVU in 2013.
Dr. George Davis, chairman of Marshall’s political science department, said he is impressed by Arthur’s commitment to student learning.
“He uses multiple exercises, including a brilliantly designed American politics simulation, to engage his students and enhance learning experience,” Davis said. “He is also committed to ‘service-learning’ as a way of engaging students through ‘experiential’ projects.
“It is clear student success is an emphasis of everything he does at Marshall.”
“I spend a considerable amount of time ensuring that the assignments I require of the students are ones that produce ‘good learning’ opportunities,” Arthur said. “I do not want students to simply try to get ‘good grades’ in my classes; I want them to come away having learned how to think about whatever concept we are addressing.”
Dr. Carrie Oeding has taught at Marshall since August 2011, when she was a visiting assistant professor.
Oeding earned her B.A. in English, with a creative writing emphasis, from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, in May 2000; her M.F.A., in English/creative writing/poetry, from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, Washington, in June 2002; and, her Ph.D. in creative writing/American literature from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in June 2007.
Dr. Rachael Peckham, associate professor of English at MU, says Oeding is a superbly talented writing teacher, one whom she has known for a long time, dating back to “when we were fellow doctoral students studying creative writing at Ohio University … her sharp intellect rather intimated me when I first met her, but then I took a graduate poetry workshop alongside her, and became the beneficiary of her meticulously careful reading and thoughtful responses.”
Oeding says she teaches students to learn to teach themselves.
“It is important to me to teach students what it really means to write for an audience,” she said. “I teach students to be receptive and engaged with a critique, by making them realize they are their initial critic. They are their own critical audience.”
Dr. Jane Hill, chair of the English department, says Oeding is an outstanding colleague.
“Dr. Oeding is always a thoughtful, ethical, intelligent colleague,” Hill said. “Her modeling such qualities has obviously become transparent to her students who display in their classroom demeanor similar qualities among themselves. Her integrity as a colleague is unimpeachable.”
Dr. Michael Schroeder has taught at Marshall since August 2011, when he was hired as an assistant professor.
He received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2003; his M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011.
Dr. Clayton Brooks was chair of the hiring committee that selected Schroeder.
“Because of his energy, work ethic, intelligence, creativity and amusing eagerness, I can safely say that Dr. Schroeder has exceeded my already high expectations,” Brooks said.
Schroeder says he believes he has a unique responsibility to be a mentor to his students.
“Many of my students are freshmen, and because of my class being at 8 a.m., five days a week, I am often their ‘first’ for many things,” Schroeder said. “I am their first instructor they meet as a student. I give them their first exam. I give many of them their first reality check when they realize that the habits they developed in high school will not be sufficient to succeed in college.
“I am often the first professor with whom they have a conversation about their grades. In many ways, I am ushering them through many new experiences. I believe I have a responsibility to these students because of this unique role. Because of this, I try to be a mentor to my students as much as possible, even though many of them will not be majoring in mathematics.”
Council of Chairs Award for Excellence in Teaching
The Council of Chairs Award for Excellence in Teaching recognizes teaching excellence in Marshall’s full-time term and temporary faculty. Each fall, members of the Council of Chairs (excepting the School of Medicine) will be permitted to nominate up to two candidates from a given department. A $1,000 cash award will be presented each year at the Spring General Faculty Meeting. Full-time term or full-time temporary faculty with at least two years’ full-time teaching at Marshall University are eligible.
Anna Rollins is described by Dr. Kelli Prejean, the interim chair of the department of English, as “one of the most balanced, even-tempered colleagues I have ever encountered.”
“She is looked upon as a dependable, hard-working colleague who serves the department in a consistent, professional manner,” Prejean said.
Rollins says that in her student evaluations, she frequently receives feedback that the courses she teaches are “unexpectedly fun,” and, in many comments, she read that the course is “not an easy A.”
“I am always encouraged to receive feedback from students that acknowledge that they both enjoyed and were challenged by the content I have taught in my courses.”
Prejean added that Rollins is “mature beyond her years.”
“I am very honored to now call her my colleague,” Prejean said. “Anna never falters on a deadline or performs poorly. She has managed to create a rewarding career for herself because of her intelligence and ability to take on challenging work.”
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Photo: Dr. Phillip T. Rutherford, an associate professor of modern European history at Marshall University, has been selected as MU’s Dr. Charles E. Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award winner for 2015-2016.