Faculty Development,
Graduate School honor TAs
for outstanding teaching

NIU’s Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center and Graduate School have honored four graduate teaching assistants for outstanding work in the classroom.

The Graduate School held a reception in April at the Holmes Student Center Regency Room to recognize the recipients of all graduate student awards including outstanding TAs. Each outstanding graduate teaching assistant was presented with a certificate by Provost Raymond Alden and a plaque by Murali Krishnamurthi, director of Faculty Development.

Faculty Development established the awards for TAs in 2004.

Here is a closer look at the winners.

Jason Jividen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, has been independently teaching courses for the past two years. His course responsibilities have included POLS150 Democracy in America, POLS251 Introduction to Political Philosophy, and POLS350 Classical and Medieval Political Philosophy.

In 2002, he received the Finkelstein Award, the department’s teaching award for graduate students, in recognition of his extensive and successful teaching experience, impressive quantitative and qualitative student evaluations, uniformly excellent faculty reviews based on class observations and unsolicited and highly laudatory remarks from students about his teaching performance.

According to one of Jividen’s nominators, the most empirical evidence that he succeeds in interesting students in the subject matter he teaches is that many students wanted to continue studying political philosophy as a result of taking his courses.

Jennifer Ann Lichamer, a master’s student in Public Health, has been a teaching assistant in the NIU School of Allied Health Professions for courses including AHLS301 Clinical Immunology and Serology, AHLS336 Clinical Microbiology, AHLS337 Parasitology and Mycology and AHLS470B Clinical Microbiology.

Her responsibilities have included primary instruction for some courses, co-teaching courses with other faculty, supervising lab sections, conducting online case studies, grading and serving as the manager of the Clinical Lab Sciences.

One of her nominators has mentioned that Lichamer “is an exemplary student, mentor, leader and educator. She has the critical thinking skills so important to working in the Clinical Laboratory Science profession. She has the organizational skills that allow her to work on several tasks at once and get them done. She does all this while completing graduate courses, not to mention being a wife and mother of two children.”

Rachel Moreno, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences, has been the teaching assistant for two different and challenging courses over several years. She has been a TA for BIOS308 Genetics for six semesters and BIOS305 Biology of Land Plants for three semesters and has been responsible for preparing laboratory materials and experiments, lecturing to recitation/lab sections, conducting laboratories, supervising individual students and lab groups and grading quizzes and laboratory notebooks.

Moreno was independently nominated by four separate faculty members in Biological Sciences because of her exemplary performance as a TA.

According to one of her four nominators, “Rachel has gone far beyond the normal expectations for teaching assistants. She has developed a Web site that students could use to receive information and help, and on her own compiled a series of guides for other TAs running and analyzing the labs. She has received excellent reviews from students and has taken on the role of mentor and guide for other graduate students.”

Kelley Wezner, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English, is a teaching assistant for First-Year English Composition and Introduction to Literature classes for the past five years. She has handled numerous other responsibilities such as undergraduate student adviser, research assistant, First-Year Composition Committee members and Graduate Studies Committee member in the English department.

Her students often mentioned that her feedback on their written work was extremely useful and that her class was the best they had ever taken. She also received the Graduate Student Assistant Award for Excellence in Teaching FYComp in 2004 as well as Mortar Board’s Recognition for Excellence in Teaching in 2005 and 2006.

One of Wezner’s nominators mentioned that in his 26 years of teaching he had “never seen a graduate student as competent in so many aspects of educational process, with expertise and experience in curriculum, policy, research, scholarship, professional service, ethics, methods, advising and assessment.”

6-4-07