Faculty Honored for Excellence in Teaching

For excellence in teaching and achievements in scholarly and creative activity, Albright presented five faculty members with awards during the 2008 Commencement ceremony.

Denise C. Greenwood, instructor in English and director of the Albright College Writing Center, was awarded the United Methodist Division of Higher Education Exemplary Teaching Award.

For more than 20 years, Greenwood has been an outstanding teacher, adviser and mentor who’s taken on one challenge after another. Working tirelessly with international students, she’s provided one-onone counseling and challenged them to formulate grammatically correct papers and well-argued essays. She’s served on and headed numerous campus committees, and she recently took over and expanded the Writing Center.

Jon E. Bekken, Ph.D., associate professor of communications, was awarded the Class of 1949 Annadora Vesper Shirk Award for Outstanding Faculty Scholarship.

A prolific author and former news editor, Bekken developed an early professional interest in the relationship between audiences and media institutions. His research examines how foreign language newspapers serve their readership in close-knit communities and how this dynamic contributes to a diversity of publishing experiences in Chicago.

The award is named in honor of Albright Professor Emerita Annadora Vesper Shirk, Ph.D.

John R. Pankratz, Ph.D., professor of history, was presented with the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award.

By diving into every conceivable teaching opportunity from Freshman Forum to senior seminars on food, Pankratz has reached out to as many students as possible—not only to share his interests, but also to learn of theirs and encourage them to trace new paths.

An accomplished musician, Pankratz is perhaps best known as Albright’s unofficial photographer, having taken countless photos of students, faculty and staff. Pankratz has also created portraiture projects such as “The Faces of Reading” and “The Faces of Albright.”

Kathy Ozment, instructor of Spanish, was the recipient of the Dr. Henry P. and M. Paige Laughlin Annual Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching. Ozment takes an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and integrates service learning into her courses. In 2004 she co-created the Interim course “Service Learning in the Dominican Republic.” Dozens of students have lived with local families and explored the challenges of rural health services, education and gender in the Dominican Republic.

Ozment also teaches “Service Learning Spanish,” which challenges students to work with adults learning English as a second language.

Lawrence P. Morris, Ph.D., associate professor of English, received the Dr. Henry P. and M. Paige Laughlin Annual Distinguished Faculty Award for Research. A speaker of ancient Greek, Morris is as much at ease in the Middle Ages as he is analyzing modern Irish literature. He’s written on the linguistic analysis of 17th-century Ireland, and he co-edited the six volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life, which offers readers a tour through history. Morris has also helped expand his students’ horizons by collaborating with several of them on their Albright Creative Research Experience (ACRE) projects.