Mark West honored as a 2024 Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence finalist

Mark I. West, Ph.D., professor of English, was honored as a finalist of the 2024 Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence, demonstrating his caliber in the classroom and dedication to his students. The Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence is one of the most important traditions at UNC Charlotte, making a nomination for this award one of UNC Charlotte’s highest honors. This is the second time West has been selected as a finalist for the award; the first time was in 2013. 

West earned his doctorate degree from Bowling Green State University, MEAS from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and B.A. from Franconia College. Since joining UNC Charlotte’s Department of English from Washburn University of Topeka in 1984, West has established himself as a leading expert in the field of children’s and young adult literature and as a professor whose classes are in high demand. West has helped to build the children’s literature program by attracting exceptional faculty, which has made the program an internationally-recognized center for the study of children’s literature. 

Paula Eckard, Ph.D., professor and former chair of the Department of English, and long-time colleague of West’s, describes him as passionate, dedicated and generous. “He has been an accomplished leader in so many realms—scholarship, university and community service, and above all, teaching,” she said. “He lives to teach.”

 Now in his 81st semester of continuous teaching in the College of Humanities & Earth and Social Sciences (formerly the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences), West has previously served as the director of American Studies, associate dean for General Education, and chair of the English Department. Despite this heavy administrative load, West has never taken a break from teaching and has taught at least one children’s literature class every semester. Reflecting on being chosen as a finalist for the Bank of America award, West explained, “I have never thought of teaching as work. For me, teaching is a calling; it is a core part of my identity.”

West’s expertise ranges from fairytales and early American classics, to popular culture creations including Harry Potter, Godzilla, and Disney characters. He has written on and taught works such as “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Wind in the Willows,” and “Winnie-the-Pooh,” and is considered to be a leading expert on children’s authors L. Frank Baum, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and Beatrix Potter.

Alongside teaching students in the classroom, West has published 23 books and has another two currently under contract. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and other essays during his career. 

“As I reflect on my teaching career, I am certain that my scholarship has informed my teaching, but it is also true that my teaching has shaped my scholarship,” West said.

A number of these essays have grown directly out of his teaching experiences, including a recent article titled “Introducing My Students to St. Nicholas,” which appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Early Children’s Literature and Culture Chronicle. The project centered on helping students understand the importance of reading primary sources, specifically the original issues of St. Nicholas, which is widely recognized as the most influential American children’s magazine ever published. The class visited the Halton Reading Room, part of the Special Collections division of the J. Murrey Atkins Library, and for many students it was their first experience visiting. West empowered students to expand their own scholarly abilities through reading the original issues of St. Nicholas. 

“This project resulted in the students doing primary research, which allowed them to make original discoveries related to their areas of interest, leading to new insights about the text, the time, and their own capacity for scholarship,” West said.

West’s career-long commitment to literacy education and community collaborations has led to a number of UNC Charlotte accolades, including the Bonnie E. Cone Professorship in Civic Engagement (2019-2022), the Governor James E. Holshouser Jr. Award for Excellence in Public Service awarded by the UNC System Board of Governors (2020), and the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Faculty Award in 2021. In 2016, he received the most prestigious honor in his field, the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Children’s Literature from the Children’s Literature Association. 

The undergraduate courses that West has taught most frequently include “Children’s Literature,” “Literature for Adolescents,” “Immigration in Children’s and Young Adult Literature,” “Children’s Literature and Literacy in the Community,” as well as courses on American and British children’s literature classics. Through these courses, West introduces students to the complex dimensions of children’s literature. 

“It is impossible to appreciate children’s literature fully without knowing something about the history of childhood, child psychology, and the cultural assumptions that undergird our attitudes concerning children’s reading material,” West said. This underpins the cross-cutting discussions on psychology, religion, gender roles, social rebellion, and censorship which take place in his classrooms. 

When describing West’s teaching contributions at UNC Charlotte, Eckard emphasizes how he draws in students from across the University. The lecture section of Children’s Literature (ENGL 3103) is the course West has taught most frequently over the years, and often consists of around 100 students in a large lecture-format. West describes his first time teaching the course in the mid-1900s as having “some bumps in the road” due to being accustomed to teaching conventionally-sized classes. To make his large lectures more engaging, he decided to draw upon his theater background developed during his brief but successful career as a professional puppeteer in the 1970s. 

He credits this theatrical experience as the basis for evolving the performance elements involved in teaching a lecture class, including learning how to use a variety of voices, acting out scenes from books, and making extensive use of the lecture hall’s stage. When describing his teaching methods, West said, “I strive to establish a rapport with my students, and their responses energize me.”

Many of West’s students are education majors who will continue on to become future teachers themselves, while others come from a diverse range of majors, including psychology, criminal justice, computer science, exercise science, and communication studies. 

“He is a generous and supportive teacher for both undergraduate and graduate students,” Eckard said, “A real role model for aspiring teachers.” West ensures his children’s literature classes are accessible to all majors and academic backgrounds, while still focusing primarily on the literary elements of the books he is covering. “When I teach courses in children’s literature, I take an interdisciplinary approach,” West explained, “I always incorporate insights and perspectives from history, psychology, art, and many other disciplines.“

West also tries to connect with his students through the sharing of stories. He incorporates storytelling in his classes, and encourages students to share their own stories as they relate to the books they are studying. One of West’s favorite stories to tell students is about his father reading “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens aloud every Christmas eve. “My father read aloud to me throughout my childhood, and this experience helped me develop a love of literature despite my initial struggles to read because of my dyslexia,” he said.

The students who enroll in his courses commend these teaching techniques, his passion for children’s literature, and his willingness to help students succeed. In class feedback, students praise West’s professionalism, kindness, patience, and enthusiasm. They share that he “provides instruction from the heart,” and “when other classes feel like they are beating you down, this one grounds you and reminds you why you want to be there in the first place.” 

Many students go on to take more courses in children’s literature and eventually become minors in Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies, which has long been one of the Department of English’s most popular minors. “Our children’s literature program is known as one of the best such programs in the English-speaking world,” West said, “I played a role in building this program, but building this program was a collaborative effort involving the late Anita Moss, Paula Connolly, Daniel Shealy, Balaka Basu and others.”

West’s commitment to teaching children’s literature extends beyond the classroom. He has been cultivating relationships between the University and the Charlotte community for forty years, and provides numerous opportunities for students with an interest in literacy education to become active in events he organizes and participates in. This includes a wide-range of events taking place at local schools, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and ImaginOn: The Joe and Joan Martin Center, a collaborative venture of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Children’s Theatre. 

In March 2013, he organized a Seuss-A-Thon event, featuring a marathon of readings from Dr. Seuss’s books. This event has evolved into the current Read-Aloud Rodeo where students and community members read picture books aloud to children as part of a nation-wide effort to encourage literacy and a life-long love of literature. West has also been involved in numerous local literary festivals, including the City Center Literary Festival which he founded on UNC Charlotte’s Center City campus, as well as EpicFest, a free literary festival presented by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

In 2017, West received a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council for a project titled “The Child Character in Southern Literature and Film.” He partnered with area schools and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library to host a variety of activities designed to raise awareness about the diversity and the history of Southern childhood as reflected in children’s literature. The activities fostered collaborations between UNC Charlotte students and teachers and students in area schools to create open discussions and empathy related to diversity in Southern childhoods. Both undergraduate and graduate students expanded their classroom work through research and training in digital humanities scholarship, which was then shared with local teachers and their students. 

West’s community engagement extends to his Storied Charlotte blog, which Charlotte Lit praised in January 2024 as an “integral part of our community’s literary landscape.” West posted the inaugural Storied Charlotte blog in February 2020, describing it as an outgrowth of his Monday Missive blog written during his time as chair of the Department of English. After being prompted by others to start posting new blogs, he created Storied Charlotte to focus on Charlotte’s vibrant literary community. 

West continues to update Storied Charlotte regularly, with recent stories uplifting Charlotte authors and their recently published books, highlighting upcoming literary events at local bookstores, and honoring Robin Brabham, the founding director of the J. Murrey Atkins Library’s Special Collections and University Archives who passed away in August, and Dannye Romine Powell, the long-time book editor at The Charlotte Observer. 

West was integral in organizing the recent community-wide CharlOz event alongside Dina Schiff Massachi, a lecturer in the Department of English and the American Studies Program. The two co-edited the new The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Broadview Edition which released on August 23, 2024. Massachi obtained her master’s degree in English from UNC Charlotte in 2015, and took several of West’s graduate classes. In a recent Storied Charlotte blog post, Travelling Down the Yellow Brick Road with Dina Schiff Massachi, West reflects on how their scholarly work together began with a directed reading project exploring the feminist themes that run through the Oz books. He said, “In the years since then, Dina has gone from being one of my graduate students to becoming a professional colleague of mine, but our shared interest in Baum’s Oz series has continued unabated.”

Alongside the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz story, the Broadview Press edition includes an introduction, original annotations, a chronology of Baum’s life, and a comprehensive bibliography. West and Massachi provided primary source documents including related texts by Baum, a selection of writings that influenced him, and several contemporary reviews. “As a professor, I take great pleasure and satisfaction when my former students become scholars in their own right. Such is the case with Dina,” West wrote in his Storied Charlotte blog, “Over the past decade, she has achieved recognition as an authority on Baum and his Oz series. We worked together as equals on this scholarly edition. In a sense, editing this edition has been our own Storied Charlotte journey down our own yellow brick road.” 

The four-day CharlOz event took place September 26-29 and explored how “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” timelessly reflects American values with its vast array of characters through a variety of experiences. The festival kicked off with a highly anticipated opening talk by Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, at the Knight Theater. The weekend’s events took place at the Atkins Library, ImaginOn, The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City and included exhibits, author talks, the premiere of His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz, and a presentation by Gita Dorothy Morena, L. Frank Baum’s granddaughter. The Charlotte Symphony presented the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz Film in Concert twice.

CharlOz was an impressive culmination of West’s work surrounding everything Oz, as well as a perfect example of how his teaching and mentorship of students in and out of the classroom has a positive impact on the wider Charlotte community. His impressive accolades, including his selection as a Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence finalist for the second time, honor his passion for children’s literature and dedication to teaching. “During his 40 years at UNC Charlotte, Mark West has built an exemplary record of excellence in the area of teaching,” Eckard said, “He ranks among the most celebrated and dedicated professors in the history of the English Department.” 

In West’s own words, “When it comes to sharing my passion for children’s literature, whether it’s through teaching my courses, through my scholarship, or through my community projects, I am a perpetual professor of children’s literature.” The ripple effect of West’s continued impact on UNC Charlotte students, the scholarly landscape of children’s literature, his fellow faculty members, local authors and literary organizations, and the Charlotte community as a whole are vast, immeasurable and everlasting.

Special thanks to Paula Eckard, Ph.D. for her contributions to this article.