Past Outstanding SL Faculty Award Recipients
2023
Kevin Bongiorni
Kevin Bongiorni of LSU’s Department of Foreign Languages was honored with this award in recognition of his innovative teaching and scholarship on using service-learning pedagogies in short-term immersive study abroad programs. His dedication to developing a new model and using it year after year transformed the world of service-learning at LSU. Rather than learn French in classrooms only or visit sites in France that are highly populated by tourists, Bongiorni’s students engage with local organizations of their choice, doing things like helping reduce food waste through redistribution programs or crafting sanitary supplies for women and girls. His students have unforgettable experiences and create new and lasting relationships with French locals, all while learning the language.
2022
Courtney Szocs
Courtney Szocs was awarded this honor due to her meaningful and impactful engagement with the Baton Rouge Food Bank and St. Vincent DePaul. Dr. Szocs integrated quality service-learning activities in her classes for many consecutive semesters, even during the challenging years of 202 and 2021. Her students’ team-based development of marketing campaigns for the Baton Rouge Food Bank, added to using their campaigns to collect donations on campus, was a uniquely impactful experience. She gave E.J. Ourso College of Business students practical experience while benefiting her community partners and raising awareness of the value of civic engagement and collective care.
2021
Corrie Kiesel
The 2021 award winner, Dr. Corrie Kiesel, teaches classes where her students engage with houseless persons and do hours of service with organizations combating that and many other issues in the Baton Rouge community (and other non-local communities). Connected to that work, they reflect on their conceptions of home while honing their writing skills. Her classes foster critical thinking, ethical reflection, and historical understanding. Dr. Kiesel has been unwavering in her commitment to using service-learning pedagogies in her classes. She has worked with multiple community partners in multiple classes. And during 2020 and 2021, she did so even more, at a time when many practitioners struggled to keep service-learning partnerships going. She has presented her work at regional and national conferences and her classes are popular among LSU students, who know how dedicated she is to teaching well.
2020
Sharon Andrews
In 2020, one of LSU’s most dedicated service-learning instructors won this award for the second time. Sharon Andrews’ work displays a unique commitment to integrating service-learning into a wide variety of English courses over nearly 20 years of reciprocal partnerships with community organizations. She is the only LSU faculty member to have won this award twice. For decades, she has worked to maintain healthy, reciprocal, and mutually respectful relationships with her students and community organizations like Connections for Life, a local women’s re-entry and transitional program. Students in Andrews’ Composition (ENGL 2000) and Introduction to Poetry (ENGL 2027) classes have engaged in dialogue with community partners through co-created art, on-site hours, and collaborative projects. Andrews also serves as the Associate Director of LSU’s University Writing Program.
2019
Christina Armistead
Christina Armistead was recognized for her outstanding commitment to implementing service-learning activities in her English 1001 and 2000 composition courses. Armistead’s courses match each of her composition students with an international student volunteer who is seeking to improve their spoken English skills. Throughout the semester, each pair meets once a week for one hour to engage in conversation and learn about one another’s home country and interests. Armistead also recruited American student volunteers to participate in the partnership by visiting international studies classes and on-campus clubs. She presented her work at both regional and national conferences to share the details of her service-learning partnership, and how it can be incorporated into courses to help students recognize and productively engage with one another.
2018
George Stanley
George Stanley was honored with this award shortly after the 20th anniversary of LSU’s single-largest service-learning course program, Chem Demo, which he helped co-found and kept running for decades. The program sends chemistry students to local schools or schools in their hometowns to do hands-on chemistry lessons for kids of all ages. Dr. Stanley also showcased his commitment to community engagement through his leadership of LSU’s “Super Science Saturdays,” which brought over 1,000 K-12 students and their parents to LSU each year. In its first 20 years, Chem Demo sent over 15,000 LSU students to over 7,200 K-12 classrooms, impacting over 180,000 K-12 students and supporting their teachers. The program has been unprecedentedly impactful and was something many Chemistry faculty utilized in their classrooms, under Dr. Stanley’s mentorship and encouragement.
2017
Lisa G. Johnson
Lisa G. Johnson in LSU’s Kinesiology department has been involved in community partnerships throughout her career at LSU. She served as the coordinator of the fitness studies concentration for the B.S. in Kinesiology, coordinated internships for the department, and supervised the health studies minor in the department. All of these works reflect her deep engagement with local communities. She helped develop programming for the Leo S. Butler Community Center, for seniors at risk for cardiovascular disease and provided LSU students the chance to work with the center. Johnson’s students have their learning outcomes enhanced by engaging with community efforts for health like the collaboration with the Butler Community Center and various YMCAs in the Baton Rouge area. Dr. Johnson also presents her work professionally on a regular basis, sharing knowledge about the engaged portfolio of research with professional audiences.
2016
Jensen Moore
After engaging over 200 students who served over 7,000 hours in the community, Jensen Moore from the Manship School of Mass Communication was honored with this award. Her public relations courses served over 30 nonprofits, working with multiple partners each semester. Students in Jensen’s classes got hands-on experience improving their writing skills, using current technologies, and fine-tuning their work for multiple audiences. In addition to their coursework, these efforts helped raise over $57,000 that went directly to nonprofits in the Baton Rouge area. She also certified her courses as communication-intensive (CxC) classes, devoting time to making sure her students leave the class with deep experiences in civic engagement and plenty of practice in their communication skills, which are essential to their future work.
2015
Sarah Becker
Sarah Becker was selected because of her outstanding record of scholarship in civic engagement that integrates research, teaching and service activities. The service-learning courses she teaches in Sociology and WGS feature reciprocal partnerships with the Baton Rouge Garden Alliance and Front Yard Bikes. Students enrolled in these courses work to empower area youth and to combat food desert issues while learning action research skills and enhancing their writing and communication skills. Becker wrote a successful $75,000 grant to the United States Department of Agriculture to build a new farmer’s market. A service-learning professor since she completed CCELL’s Service-Learning Faculty Scholars program in 2010, Becker is currently in the inaugural class of the Community Engaged Research Scholars Program, also offered through CCELL. The manuscript she created as part of this program was accepted without changes to the Journal of Teaching Sociology.
2014
Joyce Jackson
Joyce Marie Jackson was recognized for her long-term commitment to implementing service-learning in the Department of Geography & Anthropology. For many years, Jackson and students in her urban ethnography class have partnered with organizations in New Orleans, working alongside community members to collect and document history. Student projects have ranged from preserving Mardi Gras traditions to recreating personal histories lost during Hurricane Katrina. Jackson has published widely on her service-learning work and taught a service-learning course in Haiti during spring intersession 2014.
2013
Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell
This award recognizes Sulentic Dowell for her commitment to implementing service-learning in her education classes since 1999. Each semester, through a long-term partnership with Children’s Charter School, Sulentic Dowell’s students gain experience teaching in an urban setting while providing one-on-one assistance to first grade students struggling with reading and writing skills. The partnership goes beyond individualized tutoring, with the pre-service teachers also holding small group sessions, progress meetings with teachers and a final parent/child conference. Sulentic Dowell has published widely on her service-learning research and is a strong advocate for community engagement within her role at LSU.
2012
Carl Motsenbocker
Motsenbocker has implemented service-learning in his Horticulture classes since 2002. Motsenbocker’s students engage in various projects addressing food access and sustainability, including establishing and maintaining community and school gardens, developing green spaces, harvesting vegetables for use in community soup kitchens and assisting with a local farmers market. Students in his campus sustainability courses have implemented various projects to enhance LSU’s green initiatives, including campus composting, local food initiatives, bike share, education and outreach.
2011
Rick Moreland
Moreland has implemented service-learning in his English classes since 2001. His major contributions include the development of an English capstone course in which LSU students learn about the complexities of social problems and social change while working with a 10th-grade English classroom to encourage student expression through writing.
2010
Elaine Maccio
This award recognizes Maccio’s exceptional commitment to integrating quality service-learning activities into her social work graduate classes, her dissemination of related scholarship through extensive presentations and publications and her exemplar work as an engaged scholar in research, teaching and professional service. By engaging service-learning graduate students in advocacy efforts and community-engaged research for local LGBT advocacy and HIV/AIDS organizations, Maccio has deepened her students’ awareness of personal, interpersonal and institutional values and the influence of biases on discrimination.
2009
Marsha Cuddeback
Cuddeback has engaged her students in post-Katrina New Orleans rebuilding efforts, community outreach through the Office of Community Design and Development and community development work with Bethel Colony South.
2008
Judy Myhand
Myhand has involved her service-learning students in testing, preparing and publishing healthful recipes to be used by Food Bank clients and a Summer Experience agriculture and nutrition program for McKinley High students.
2007
Jean Rohloff
Rohloff has engaged her service-learning students in tutoring and in writing assignments, such as competitive grants that garner funds for area public schools.
2006
Edith Babin
Babin's Service-Learning English 2001 (Advanced Composition) and 3001 (Writing in the Arts and Social Sciences) students wrote biographies and memoirs for area senior citizens which become part of the T. Harry Williams Oral History Project.
2005
Jan Hondzinski
Hondzinski’s work in service-learning includes development of a course in Neuromotor Control of Human Movement where, as part of their coursework, LSU students prepare interactive lessons about neural topics for students in East Baton Rouge Parish schools. Students in Kinesiology 3517 identify neural topics on which the children will be tested, describe nervous system functions and create activities that describe these functions and disseminate information regarding neural function.
2004
Carol O’Neil
Under O'Neil's guidance, Community Nutrition students have been involved in numerous nutrition-related service-learning projects. One example of the projects her human ecology students participate in is "GUMBO." In this program, funded by The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, LSU students teach community members about food preparation, food safety and nutrition to help prepare them for entry-level food service jobs.
2003
Sharon Andrews
In both poetry and composition classes, Andrews' innovative and ambitious “pedagogy of witness” has challenged students to confront difficult social issues through their reading, writing and community engagement.
2002
Leon Steele
Professor Steele’s design students produced a comprehensive plan for the restoration of the historical district of Bogalusa, worth over $300,000 to the community.