Two faculty members from the Department of Political Science and the Department of English in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences received the 2024 Way Klingler Teaching Enhancement Award:
- Dr. Amber Wichowsky, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science
- Dr. Amelia Zurcher, director of the University Honors Program and professor of English
The award grants $20,000 toward their project, “Civic Conversation and the MCC Methods of Inquiry Course,” which will adapt the goals and methods of Marquette’s successful co-curricular Civic Dialogues project into the Methods of Inquiry class (CORE 1929/1929H) in the Foundations Tier of the Marquette Core Curriculum. The project seeks to develop an innovative, cross-disciplinary first-year curriculum to teach civic reasoning and discourse and collaborative problem-solving skills to a significant portion of first-year undergraduates at Marquette.
The Committee on Teaching praised the alignment of the project with Marquette’s mission to form persons with and for others. Committee members also praised the breadth of the project’s potential benefit for students across all seven undergraduate colleges.
“Learning how to listen with respect, empathy, and curiosity; developing the skills to address ill-structured problems effectively; and learning to solve problems collaboratively are foundational to the transformative education we aim to provide our students, consistent with our Jesuit emphasis on the formation of whole persons, and key to a healthy democracy,” said Provost Kimo Ah Yun. “With an election year upon us, this project could not be more timely or important.”
The Way Klingler Teaching Enhancement Award is an annual award given to a team of two or more faculty members to develop, implement and evaluate a specific teaching project. One award of up to $20,000 is given to the selected project team for one fiscal year.
Wichowsky and Zurcher were honored at the 65th Annual Père Marquette Dinner on Thursday, May 2, in the AMU Monaghan Ballrooms.
