Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Plishka who was awarded the Van Beck Hall Graduate Student Teaching Award!
In the words of the awards committee: "The award recognizes the richness of Matt’s teaching portfolio and his highly successful theme-driven approach to teaching. During his years in the PhD program, Matt has served as a TA for courses in U.S., Sports, and East Asian history. He has also taught twice a stand-alone course on World Environmental History and taught another stand-alone course on Modern Latin America. The excellent syllabi for his stand-alone courses are both inviting and intellectually rigorous.
As evident in his efforts to help students see connections between the social and natural sciences, Matt’s teaching approach is marked by the same kind of interdisciplinarity that informs his own scholarship. He also seeks to enrich his students’ learning experiences by drawing on highly diverse sources ranging from poetry and legal tracts to digital tools such as the Atlas of Environmental Justice. Finally, Matt works hard to create an interactive learning environment and sense of community in the classroom. This is why Matt usually starts his classes with a pop culture video related to the day’s topic and then has students discuss the video in small groups. At the heart of his teaching is also an effort to help students understand how the environment has shaped the past. In sum, Matt’s contributions to teaching exemplify the commitment to engaged learning that characterizes our program as a whole.”
