2022 Faculty Awards for Teaching Excellence
Faculty Awards for Teaching Excellence honor faculty members in Arts & Sciences who devote special efforts to teaching and inspiring their students through lectures, seminars, laboratories, independent studies, and mentoring. In 2022, three faculty members were honored.
Nominations for the award come initially from the Student Assembly's Undergraduate Council and the A&S Graduate Student Association. Candidates are evaluated on the basis of teaching quality, innovation, and demonstrated commitment to student learning. Awardees are chosen in order to balance academic rank, disciplinary area, graduate and undergraduate teaching, and tenure and non-tenure eligible status, including lecturers.
Catherine Forestell
Professor Forestell’s teaching contributes to many levels of our curriculum, including a PSYC 100 course, a sophomore/junior-level course in developmental psychology, a senior seminar in Infancy along with our graduate research methods course. In terms of innovation, Professor Forestell has taken on challenges with developing courses that are new preparations on a regular basis. For example, she initially team-taught a new COLL 100 course and then went on to develop the course on her own. She also has re-established teaching PSYC 453, Infancy, a course that is very popular with our majors. Moreover, Professor Forestell’s course evaluations are consistently solid and the student comments reflect the thought and effort that she puts into her courses.
Outside of the classroom, Professor Forestell’s record of student mentorship is outstanding. She has led 12 Master’s student thesis committees and 21 honors student thesis committees. Even more impressive is how many of these students go on to a wide variety of successful careers, including in academia. I also note the number of student co-authors on publications and conference presentations with Professor Forestell is impressive. Professor Forestell clearly engages with students in her laboratory at a high level, which allows them to complete projects that are often presented at conferences or published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Based on all of these accomplishments, it is fitting that Professor Catherine Forestell is recognized with the 2022 Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
Michael Iyanaga
Professor Iyanaga’s teaching quality and demonstrated commitment to student learning are readily apparent from student comments like this one:
Professor Iyanaga embodies what any W&M professor should strive to be. He goes out of his way to create an inclusive environment for all students to walk into his classroom. Professor Iyanaga integrates diverse readings and content into his courses. This is an example not only students but other faculty members should look up to. He ties the class content to the real world and presents it in a way where students can learn and apply it to their everyday lives. During my four years at W&M, I have never seen a professor who shows up to class every day with such a great attitude and energy; it is so contagious.
Professor Iyanaga has developed and taught a series of courses in Latin American and Caribbean music and religion, including courses with a specific focus on Brazil. He has offered some of these as COLL 100, 150, and 300 courses as well as an upper level required course and a senior writing seminar. The latter offers students practice in designing their own projects and presenting their research at an end-of-the-year symposium. Toward the goal of developing a concentration in Brazilian Studies, Professor Iyanaga has brought together a consortium of Brazil scholars. His course offerings strengthen the focus on Black and Latinx populations, with content focused on Afro-Latin American and more specifically Afro-Brazilian music, religion, religiosity, and culture. Intellectually, his courses disrupt preconceived notions about African “primitivism” and about the “exotic nature” of Latin and Afro-Latin culture. He challenges students to understand how “Latin Music” has been essentialized in European-American interpretations. His classes all seek to uncover Eurocentric hegemonies and confront some of the lasting detrimental effects of colonialism, particularly in notions of beauty, aesthetics, and ways of seeing the world.
It is fitting that he now be recognized with the Arts & Sciences 2022 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
Jay Watkins
Jay Watkins has been a leader in developing a dynamic and innovative curriculum at William & Mary and an exceptionally strong classroom teacher. His courses enrich History’s graduate and undergraduate offerings in important ways, helping students grasp the complexities of twentieth-century American culture, broadly defined. In addition to the history of sexuality, his courses address themes of cultural identity as refracted through human rights, commemorative practices, and performance. In so doing, Professor Watkins has eagerly taken on the most controversial issues of our day, including debates over Confederate statues in Virginia and the South. Some of his most popular topics courses are ‘Social Justice Movements,’ ‘America in the 1980s,’ and a COLL 100 entitled ‘Dixie’s Monuments.’
Professor Watkins’s investment in curricular innovation is most apparent in his COLL 350 courses. His ‘History on Stage’ was among the few pilot COLL 350s taught in Fall 2020. Professor Watkins has since offered two other distinct COLL 350s, including ‘The Queer South’ and “Sex in America.’ Many of these courses are cross-listed with Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.
Professor Watkins’s commitment to student learning is visible in the high resonance his courses have for a generation of young people inspired by social activism and the fight for justice and equity. Students describe Dr. Watkins as an “incredibly approachable, passionate, engaging, and helpful professor” and praise his classes for exposing students “to different ideas, concepts, perspectives that [they have] never encountered before.” Professor Watkins speaks, in particular, to the needs and concerns of queer students on campus. His efforts in the renaming of Boswell Hall and his service as the Director of the Boswell Initiative, which delivers programs promoting scholarship on the cultural, economic, political, and policy dimensions of LGBTIQ life in the U.S., have created a more inclusive and affirmative climate on campus.
While excelling at teaching, Professor Watkins has also published his first monograph, Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism (University of Florida Press, 2018) and assumed major service responsibilities. These include serving on the important Principles for Naming and Renaming Presidential Working Group and co-directing William & Mary’s LGBTIQ Research Project.
These accomplishments make particularly fitting that Professor Watkins be recognized with the Arts & Sciences 2022 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
