Robinson named a finalist for University’s top teaching award

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Associate professor Joanne Robinson from the Religious Studies Department is the fourth 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 final finalist will be featured next week.

For Joanne Robinson, her syllabi during the past 15 years tell the story of her pedagogical journey. She admitted that when she first began teaching students, she taught them as she had been taught: largely through “teacher-centered” lectures and traditional forms of assessment. Over time, she began to realize that the classroom is a space where students can begin to explore new identities and ideas. This recognition allowed Robinson “to embrace a vision of the classroom as a place for learning how to take chances, for testing out new knowledge and for playing with ideas.” By designing differentiated assignments and new platforms for instruction, she could “stretch the walls of the classroom creatively into the world.”

Since joining the Department of Religious Studies in 1996, Robinson has received an impressive number of teaching-related awards and grants. At UNC Charlotte, she was nominated by her students for and received the B.E.S.T. (Building Educational Strengths and Talents) Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008. In 2010-11, she became a University College Faculty Fellow.

Indiana’s Wabash Center, an institution dedicated to promoting a sustained conversation about pedagogy in the fields of religion and theology, awarded Robinson a grant to participate in the Wabash Center Mid-career Colloquy for Faculty Teaching in Colleges and Universities in 2008-09; she also received an award to participate in the Wabash Center Colloquy on Writing on the Scholarship of Teaching (2010-11), for which she engaged in a year-long process of critical reflection on writing in the areas of teaching and learning. Most recently, Robinson received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a course focused on the question “How is the World Ordered?”

According to Robinson, the key to her success as a teacher is transparency; by ensuring that the goals and outcomes of the course are transparent, she establishes a classroom ethos of mutual respect and high expectation. She extends this engaged and collegial intellectual atmosphere beyond the classroom. Her students describe weekly informal gatherings hosted by Robinson in which interested graduate and undergraduate students stop by her office for “playtime,” where they ask questions, discuss related issues and exchange ideas.

Students describe playtime as a productive environment for intellectual interaction. One graduate student wrote that “Dr. Robinson brings enthusiasm and openness to active student engagement that encourages a free exchange of ideas and diversity of perspective that make the course material accessible and interesting.” By creating a stimulating environment, Robinson has been able to cultivate a practice of intellectual courage and creativity among her students, achieving her goal of instilling “analytical sophistication about complex issues, even in the absence of solutions or agreement.”

James Tabor, chair of religious studies, described Robinson’s impressive teaching accomplishments. “I think I can say without the slightest exaggeration that no faculty member I know of, in our department or outside of it, has had more of a high quality educational, inspirational and life-mentoring influence on students than Professor Joanne Robinson.”