NIU honors Lukaszuk, Montgomery, Robertson
for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Nursing’s Oldenburg honored for excellence in instruction

by Mark McGowan

Good teachers know it when they see it: the “a-ha moment,” that instant when a student’s eyes light up in recognition of a concept newly understood.

For good teachers, it’s a frequent and favorite reward for their work. They pay attention to their pedagogy to adjust, enhance and improve what they do, spreading the light bulbs across as many minds as possible.

NIU has many good teachers, and Judith Lukaszuk, Carla Montgomery and Julie Robertson stand tall among them. The three are this year’s recipients of the Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Joining them in honor is Nancy Oldenburg, an instructor in the School of Nursing, who has received the university’s second Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction award.

Lukaszuk, from the School of Family, Consumer and Nutrition Sciences in the College of Health and Human Sciences; Montgomery, from the Department of Geology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; and Robertson, from the School of Nursing in the College of Health and Human Sciences, now enjoy the university’s longest-standing honor.

It stands in a class of its own because the nominations and subsequent words of support originate with the young minds on the other side of the classroom.

“That’s what makes it really special. They’ve been the guinea pigs on the receiving end of the teaching,” Montgomery said. “I was very much flattered when I heard the students wanted to nominate me. It really was a thrill.”

Initiated in 1966, the awards honor excellent undergraduate teaching in the university, encourage improvement of instruction and promote discussion among members of the university community on the subject of teaching.

Nominees must be full-time faculty whose major responsibility is teaching and must have worked at least five full academic years at NIU. Lukaszuk, Montgomery and Robertson each receive a check for $2,000.

Here is a closer look at the four.

Judith Lukaszuk

When a heart attack sent the frightened woman to a hospital bed, it also brought her Judith Lukaszuk and a nutrition plan.

Fearing for her life, the woman embraced Lukaszuk’s healthy recommendations and soon found herself on the road to wellness. Six months later, after her initial zeal had worn off, she resumed a diet of double cheeseburgers and French fries before returning to the hospital with complaints of chest pains.

The moral of the story? Patients can become complacent with their diets once their fear from the initial event wears off.

It’s just one of many stories Lukaszuk uses in her classroom to keep students engaged in the curriculum and aware of the life-preserving consequences of the profession they have chosen.

“My challenge is to address students in different manners because everyone learns in different ways,” Lukaszuk said. “I do a lot of storytelling in class because a lot of students will remember that forever.”

Students agree that her teaching is exceptional.

“Dr. Lukaszuk took our class into the future with cutting-edge research on nutragenomics and complementary medicine. She brought in samples of probiotics for the class to try,” graduate Pam Whitfield Jacobson said. “We were required to do allergy studies on ourselves. Many of us discovered physical sensitivities we did not know we even had. We sat with our eyes closed, listening to an audio tape on stress, trying to relax and learning the impact stress has on health.”

“I have kept all of her notes from FCNS 415 and 416, still utilizing them to this day,” alumna Jacqueline Tobinson Glew said. “She had encouraged us to compile small notebooks of useful information to be utilized when we were in practice as dietetic interns.”

Lukaszuk, who came to NIU in 2000, discovered her love of teaching as a graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh. She later honed her skills in the private sector, working for a company that sent her across the United States presenting six-hour lectures on nutrition and dietetics.

She’s kept her practice current as a nutrition and dietetics consultant for various NIU Huskies teams and for athletic trainers at other colleges and universities, including Aurora and Benedictine.

The avid tennis player also has generated headlines for her work with the U.S. Tennis Association.

Lukaszuk presented lectures on nutrition at three U.S. Opens, where coaches learned how to feed their star athletes. Only 60 speakers are invited each year, and most focus on the mechanics of the sport.

But her primary mission has remained “building dietitians of the future.”

She’s a professor who diligently reads student evaluations and makes many of the suggested changes, whether they deal with the duration of the class or her teaching style.

“Some people drag themselves out of bed every morning. I don’t do that. I’m happy to come to work every day,” she says. “I have a passion for what I do. I’m caring. I’m competent. If I don’t know something, I’ll look it up and follow through.”

The university-level teaching award – Lukaszuk already has similar honors at the school and college levels – is an honor and a surprise. “I’m just glad I’m an effective teacher for them,” she said, “because that’s what they’re here for.”

Lukaszuk and her husband, Jack, are parents to Shannon, 4, and Megan, 3.

Carla Montgomery

Carla Montgomery knew all along that her destiny lay in the classroom.

“I was always inclined in that direction,” Montgomery said. “When we played school as kids, I always seemed to be the teacher.”

But it was a dynamic professor of geology she encountered during her freshman year at Wellesley who determined which classroom.

Montgomery intended to major in math, but she needed to pick up a science lab. Diana Chapman Kamilli’s geology course offered an intriguing – and ultimately life-changing – fit.

Kamilli passionately loved teaching, even taking students on weekend hunts for fossils and minerals. “She really threw herself heart and soul into the course,” Montgomery said. “It made me want to be that kind of professor.”

And, since 1978, Montgomery has opened the eyes of many students like herself.

She became a teacher “because it was fun. Because I wanted to share. Because I felt I could make a difference,” she said. “The world needs to have citizens who are better informed about the world they live in and professionals who are trained to understand that world.”

Undergraduates majoring in other disciplines are exposed to the geology all around them – mountains, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes, groundwater, land use, pollution – and gain an understanding of how relevant geology is to their lives. Her classroom is one of personal examples, topical humor and striking visuals.

Meanwhile, Montgomery has avoided the language of the “stuffy scientist,” not only in her teaching but in her writing.

Among her many publications are “Environmental Geology,” now in its seventh edition, and “Physical Geology,” a textbook so fascinating to one non-science student at Brooklyn College in New York City that it inspired her off-Broadway play.

“I never lose sight of how exciting the field can be,” she said. “I try to remember what it was like discovering geology for the first time, and keep that magic alive.”

Former students applaud her efforts to make “even the more-difficult concepts easy to understand” and praise “how much enjoyment Dr. Montgomery gets out of teaching.”

“I did very well in Dr. Montgomery’s ‘Elements of Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry’ because I had a great teacher who pushed me to do better, to think harder and to work for my grade,” alumna Leah Mitchell said. “Dr. Montgomery always knew the key questions to ask to make sure that we fully understood the subject matter that she was presenting.”

“The more you teach, the more you begin to appreciate the different background students come to you with – and I don’t mean how much science they’ve had, but the different ways they see things,” Montgomery said.

In non-major classes, students sometimes even earn credit for technically wrong test answers if they have made a logical argument based on their level of knowledge. In such a case, “I’m excited that they’re thinking,” she said. “Geology is not just about memorizing facts and equations.”

Montgomery’s NIU career has included administrative work – most recently as acting associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – but she’s never left the classroom. She still ponders her subject and her teaching style, and never takes a vacation without camera in hand to capture more geologic examples for her students.

Montgomery and her husband (and sometime field assistant), Warren, a consultant retired from Bell Labs, have been married for 33 years.

Julie Robertson

Teaching never really existed on Julie Robertson’s radar.

Robertson was a nurse, after all, and it was her sister Sharon who had spent years teaching high school business courses. Yet two decades into her career in community health nursing, Robertson felt an unexpected tug toward the classroom.

As a nurse manager for many years, she had conducted a great deal of staff development and found personal rewards in watching nurses grow. Meanwhile, she had returned to school for a master’s degree.

“I loved management but knew I couldn’t do it forever,” Robertson said. “And I had always admired my sister, who was a great teacher, but I didn’t think I could do it.”

But when a job opening in the NIU School of Nursing caught her eye, she applied. When the offer came, she almost declined.

A firm nudge from her husband, Ken, executive director of the Fox River Chapter of the American Red Cross, changed her mind.

“Ann Hart, chair of the program then, said mine was the most tentative acceptance she’d ever had,” Robertson said. “I had never taught before, and on my first day, I was just terrified. But when I started teaching, students wrote down everything I said. I thought, ‘This is a powerful position. I can make a difference in their lives, and in nursing.’ ”

Twenty-one years later, the Rochester, N.Y., native sees her role as a facilitator, guide and mentor.

“My goal is to get students through the class learning a lot and feeling good about themselves,” she said. “I care about my students. I go into class wanting them to succeed, and I’m just thrilled when that happens. I have the responsibility to make that happen.”

It means Robertson prepares diligently for every class, although she loves questions and perspectives she hadn’t foreseen.

“Students today are very thoughtful. They come expecting more from us as teachers,” she said. “They’re more engaged in the learning process. I love classrooms where students are involved and interested.”

Meanwhile, Robertson has high expectations for students: “I have a big thing about image – professionalism – and writing well, caring about what you do and making sure you’re well-prepared,” she said. “Nursing requires lifelong learning.”

Tomorrow’s nurses recognize Robertson’s “obvious passion.”

“For a nursing student such as me, who has no interest in either research or community health, I was dreading these courses. To my great surprise, I ended up loving not only the content but the instructor as well,” student Janelle Megenhardt said.

“She guides you through the information with a soft hand that gives you room to not only learn the information presented but also to grow as a student and to develop an appreciation for the subject and the nurses who work in the field.”

Accordingly, community nursing still holds Robertson’s allegiance.

“Nursing has just exploded in terms of opportunities. The focus of health care is moving more into community health, and I have a responsibility to help students broaden their perspectives about their practice,” she added. “Health care is just too expensive. We have to focus on prevention.”

But as retirement looms in a few years, Robertson is broadening her own perspectives. “I’d like to write novels and children’s books,” she said, “but I will still want to teach part-time.”

Nancy Oldenburg

Although Nancy Oldenburg planned to find and follow a path other than nursing – her mother’s career – she pursued it anyway when her friend declared that major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Oldenburg soon was hooked, although that friend realized that nursing wasn’t in her life’s prescription.

Now, after 25 years as a pediatrics nurse in hospitals, it’s Oldenburg’s job to help mold tomorrow’s nurses – and it’s a responsibility she holds dear.

The career demands intellectuals, she said, and the education doesn’t stop with a degree and nursing licensure exam.

“I love to learn – I’m still in school – and when I can communicate that to students, I think that’s a positive,” she said. “There’s no way to teach all the content they’ll need, so it’s important they know how to learn, and that if they need information, they know where to find it and can judge the validity of what they find.”

Meanwhile, Oldenburg works to ensure that her students learn more than how to start I.V.s and give shots despite their initial excitement about performing such procedures.

“The most important thing is for students to understand why they’re doing something,” she said. “The whole picture of what’s wrong with the patient becomes so much more obvious to them, and it makes them such better nurses.”

A nursing instructor since 2001, Oldenburg currently is working with clinical students at Kishwaukee Community Hospital.

Her Friday group of rookies is “just getting to experience what they learn in the lab (but) with real patients.” Her Wednesday flock of second-semester students is "so much more confident and provide so much more patient care.”

“They really keep me on my toes,” Oldenburg said. “I learn something every single day, from the students and from the others at Kishwaukee.”

In the past, her pathophysiology students studied disease processes and the effects they have on patients. Next semester, she will teach pediatrics in the classroom.

A doctoral candidate in educational technology, Oldenburg also is a frequent teacher of online courses including those in the school’s RN-to-BS program. The working RNs come with wildly varying years on the job – some are in their 20s while others are 50-somethings with three decades under their scrubs – and diverse experiences.

Students laud her caring, her compassion and her pursuit of excellence.

“She truly cared about making sure that her students were learning everything they needed to learn – everything they possibly could learn – from this clinical experience,” student Jody Brown said, “and welcomed suggestions on how she could improve her skills as an educator.”

That transition from active nurse to teacher was made easier, Oldenburg said, by the giving nature of student-focused colleagues who are happy to share teaching materials, syllabi and good advice.

She came to academia because she felt “ready for a change,” she said.

“I love nursing, and I still have the ability to be in the hospital and in patient care,” she said. “I love the interaction with patients. I love seeing the change you can see in patients. One day is never the same as another, and when you don’t feel challenged, there are always other opportunities.”

Oldenburg and her husband, Wayne, an engineer at Hamilton-Sundstrand, are parents to grown sons Tim, Adam and Rob. They have one grandson, Langdon, and a second grandchild on the way.

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