Individual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education in Race & Ethnicity Instruction

Created in 2017, this award recognizes faculty members who are exceptionally dedicated to the educational experiences of undergraduates in courses that serve the LSA R&E degree requirement, and who demonstrate this dedication through achievements and innovations in their own and others’ classrooms or academic programs.

 

Gregory Dowd

History, American Culture & Native American Studies

Dowd’s nomination package highlights his role in American Culture 100. This class was created in 1996 as a way to help students to meet the newly established R&E requirement. Teaching it has always been challenging. By 2010, Dowd, then chair of the Department of American Culture, took the unusual step of assigning the department’s most unpopular course to himself. He has since taught the course eleven times, enrolling hundreds of students and supporting more than a dozen GSIs for who he has been a gentle, conscientious, and thoughtful mentor, helping them to navigate the tricky waters of R&E teaching. He participated in the CRLT Large Course Initiative, producing a substantial reworking of the course in subsequent iterations, including the use of i>clickers to create an interactive classroom, and has worked with IGR to create a drop-in activity, to be instituted next fall. He served on the Collegewide R&E Review Committee (2015-2016) and has been a participant in departmental discussions about the R&E requirement, dramatically shaping that conversation through the example of his work in AMCULT 100 and AMCULT 367. Finally, He has also recently been recruited by Associate Dean Fiona Lee to develop a course on Native American History in Michigan, part of LSA's DEI initiatives.