Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau, associate professor of German and comparative literature, is the first of five finalists for the 2012 Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence to be profiled in Inside UNC Charlotte. The recipient of the honor, UNC Charlotte’s top teaching award, will be named at a special reception, Friday, Oct. 19. The other four finalists will be featured in alphabetical order in the weeks prior to the reception.
According to Robert Reimer, chair of the Department of Languages and Culture Studies, the success of UNC Charlotte’s German program is due to its coordinator and “lifeblood,” Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau. Her success, Reimer noted, is the result of her leadership and ability to adapt to the “changing pedagogical landscape in today’s electronic and globalized world and to her incredible energy showcased in her classroom teaching and mentorship of each and every one of her students.”
Aliaga-Buchenau has described herself as a teacher in every aspect of her daily life. This commitment to teaching has been recognized by the University community. She is the Bonnie E. Cone Early Career Teaching Professor for 2009-12, an award that honors superior achievement in teaching among new faculty. One of her students described Aliaga-Buchenau as a professor that “injects students with knowledge and practice and infects them with enthusiasm for and a desire to learn German.” Without her presence, the student continued, “I would lack the direction and confidence I have gained not only as a student, but as a person.”
Teaching is “the ability to reach people, to open new worlds to them…and to participate in their journey,” Aliaga-Buchenau stated. She has been able to open physical and intellectual worlds for students by creating study abroad opportunities, which have proven important to the successful recruitment and retention of German majors at UNC Charlotte. Through a partnership with the German Language and Culture Foundation, she procured more than $60,000 in three years to send 35 students to Germany for one month of intensive language instruction.
Aliaga-Buchenau also leads short-term study abroad programs to Europe. The most meaningful, emotional and memorable course she has taught occurred when she traveled with students to Berlin and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland in 2011. She and the students toured Auschwitz with faculty emeritus Susan Cernyak-Spatz and listened as she recounted her experiences as a prisoner there. For Aliaga-Buchenau, the Holocaust is an important element of her German identity, and she has made it her mission to ensure that those who enter her classroom confront the human capacity to commit, and also to overcome, horrific atrocities. She helped design the minor in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights housed in the Global, International and Area Studies Department in order to teach the importance of tolerance.
A mentor to her students, Aliaga-Buchenau assists with applications for jobs or graduate school. Her former students use their language abilities in graduate programs and work environments across the United States and throughout the world, including with schools and companies in Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Poland.