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Two English Grad Students Receive Graduate Associate Teaching Award
Two graduate students from the Ohio State English Department were recently awarded the 2008 Graduate Associate Teaching Award (GATA). This award is the university's highest recognition of exceptional teaching by graduate students and is accompanied by a $1500 award, a plaque, and a letter of recognition.Kelly Bradbury is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. She is working on a dissertation, tentatively titled The Theory and Practice of Intellectualism in the U.S.: Literacy, Lyceums, and Labor Colleges, that explores the connections between literacy and American intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Bradbury has developed a unit on anti-intellectualism for the composition classroom that has been published in a composition reader titled Reading Popular Culture: An Anthology for Writers.
Bradbury appreciates how teaching stimulates intellectual growth, both her own and her students, and finds her students are adventurous, reflective critics. "My students value each others' opinions and expertise and enjoy participating in critical conversations that emerge in the classroom but extend beyond it into the community," said Bradbury.
Thomas Pruiksma is a third-year MFA student in Creative Writing, who spent the past year on a Presidential Fellowship. Pruiksma, along with K.V. Ramakoti, wrote A Feast for the Tongue: Forty Servings of Spoken Tamil with Helpings of Equally Spoken English. He is also the author of Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar, translations from the 12th century Tamil poet and female saint, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. His MFA thesis is a book-length memoir about living in Madurai.
Pruiksma wants his students to take away from his classes "something of the excitement and love of language that my best teachers gave to me." Pruiksma said, "I once had a student write, ‘I learned more about myself than I ever thought I would from an English course.' And in reality that's what English should be about: how you react to things, how you are changed by something you read. That's what I'm always hoping for."
Kelly and Tom join the the College of Humanities graduate students who won five of the ten GATA awards this year. Anouschka Bergmann (Linguistics), Christopher Bungard (Greek and Latin), and Sarah Sanderson (Spanish and Portuguese) were also 2008 award recipients.
Graduate Teaching Associates must be nominated for the award and are then asked to prepare an application portfolio. The Graduate School's Award Committee, comprised of undergraduate Honors students, Council of Graduate Student representatives, previous GATA winners, and faculty Distinguished Teaching Award winners, review submissions and select up to ten award recipients. Winners are selected based on a variety of criteria, including their ability to stimulate thinking, their enthusiasm and knowledge of their course material, and their willingness to solicit and utilize feedback.
