Teaching & Advising

UNC Charlotte students work together to prepare a giant red balloon for liftoff. They have attached a camera to the balloon’s string to take aerial photographs of the UNC Charlotte campus that they will use to create a map. Through exercises like this one, students in the geography class on spatial thinking gain hands-on experience that expands their understanding of the concept, which offers a geographic perspective on how objects, processes and phenomena relate to each other in time and space.

In recognition of their exceptional teaching, Ashley Bryan, Nishi Bryska and Ian Marriott have received the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Excellence in Teaching Awards for 2017. Dean Nancy A. Gutierrez and the awards committee chairs commended the honorees and award finalists for their innovation, creativity and focus on engaging students in scholarship and research.

Hollywood writer and producer Calvin Brown Jr. is serving as the 2017 Africana Studies Artist-in-Residence from March 13-March 23, 2017. Brown, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate and native Charlottean, Brown will guest lecture in classes, meet with students in a brown bag question-and-answer session, and work with select students to produce a short film on the history of the Africana Studies Department.

The soldier’s face has faded in the World War II photograph, falling victim to the ravages of time. Yet, even as the picture has turned cloudy, the image of her father has grown sharper in Barbara Presnell’s mind. Presnell, an award-winning documentary poet and essayist, has captured the story of her father William G. Presnell in her Blue Star collection, published earlier this year by Press 53 in Winston-Salem.

The Department of Psychology received The Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2016, in recognition of the department’s efforts to improve students learning and outcomes, through the collective responsibility of faculty members for maintaining high-quality teaching.

Writing is foundational to the overall success of all UNC Charlotte students. When faculty in the University Writing Program started discussing changes to the first-year writing curriculum, the focus was on discovery of the best way to provide knowledge and support.

Students in UNC Charlotte geologist William Garcia’s classes can imagine they have stepped back in time to the Mesozoic era, as they follow an interactive path of dinosaur footprints newly installed on the university campus. His students and others on campus are now able to step outside the customary lecture-based classroom setting and participate in a hands-on, kinesthetic learning experience.

In the fragile pages of recipe books from the early modern period, UNC Charlotte researcher Jennifer Munroe and her students find traces of life and death. They decipher the words and absorb the daily struggles and joys of the women who created these chronicles of life between 1550 and 1800. These books are much more than repositories for recipes. Through the process of transcription, scholars worldwide are digitizing images of each page of old books, transcribing the vocabulary and script and publishing the content in online databases for the world to study and share.

Charlotte Teachers Institute has named 104 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teachers as CTI Fellows to participate in its innovative, interdisciplinary seminars for 2016. CTI seminars are led by eight faculty experts in the arts, sciences and education, including five from UNC Charlotte – with four from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

In recognition of their exceptional teaching, Allison Hutchcraft, Susan Hodge and Joseph Kuhns have received the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Excellence in Teaching Awards for 2016.