Office of Academic Affairs

2010 Kirk Award Recipients

The Kirk Award was endowed by a gift from a member of the board of trustees in 1995. The endowment has recognized excellent teachers at Centre since 1996. Below are the 2010 Kirk Award recipients and their teaching philosophies.

• Helen Emmitt, Professor of English
• Bruce Johnson, Brown Professor of Economics
• Joe Workman, Professor of Chemistry

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Helen Emmitt
Professor of English

Teaching is a multi-faceted art, and it begins with students who are eager and curious. As a professor (that is to say, someone who is both a scholar and a teacher and who finds a synergy between those two activities), I begin by trying to foster that curiosity and openness to ideas, and then to work with students to understand whatever material I am teaching. First and foremost, I try to convey my love of my discipline, English. I want to help students to enter the world of words and to find a place for themselves there. This is not always easy, especially in an era that valorizes the visual. But students like ideas, they like characters and plot, they even love beautiful imagery.  A professor needs to find a way to build on that interest and help it to grow. I find that communicating my own love of words is a good start. Beyond that, I try to work with students to develop their skills in reading and writing (for pleasure grows with mastery and confidence). Sometimes I lecture, often I lead discussion (and sometimes I am led by it), and always I push students to find their own voices, their own modes of analysis.

While I believe that every professor must know his or her discipline and love it in order to communicate knowledge, I think that it is equally important to be a listener, to take seriously what students bring to the classroom. But I think that it is important that these ideas about what I want to achieve with and for students not solidify into a methodology. I come into every class and every meeting with students ready to try whatever tools are available to me to help them to educate themselves. Each class and each student in it provide a new teaching experience and a new challenge for me.

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Joe Workman
Professor of Chemistry

My primary goal for any course is to establish a partnership with each student to learn organic chemistry and use it to solve complex problems. It is hard to do this because of the reputation organic chemistry has as an insurmountable barrier. I love the complexity of organic chemistry and the challenge of teaching it to students who have never seen such chemistry before. I try to demand a great deal from students, but in order to do this I have to be willing to work as hard as they do by keeping extensive office hours and giving regular and timely feedback. No matter how small a class is, my most effective teaching takes place in my office where I can tailor my explanations to an individual student. By doing these things students become more receptive to the importance and beauty of organic chemistry and less fixated on simply surviving. The development of a student’s work ethic, problem-solving ability, and increase in self-confidence are just as important to me as their knowledge of organic chemistry once the course is over.