Teaching award nominations open for 2017-18 at Penn State York

The James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching honors outstanding faculty members
York 2017 Teaching Award

Spring  nominations for the 2017-18 James H. Burness Awards for Excellence in Teaching are open through Feb. 23.   The 2016-17 recipients were Gene Ellis, left, part-time instructor in communication arts and sciences, and Orsay Kucukemiroglu, professor of business administration.  Kucukemiroglu retired June 30, 2017, and now has emeritus status. 

Credit: Barbara Dennis

Nominations are being accepted for the 2017-18 James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award is given annually to recognize any aspect of excellent instruction (lectures, demonstrations, classroom activities, handling of discussions, individual attention, laboratory instruction, etc.) that contributes to the academic quality of Penn State York.

The purpose of the award is to recognize excellence in instruction, not to identify the most popular faculty member. The teaching award is named in memory of the late James H. Burness, in recognition of his outstanding teaching and service to the campus.  Burness died in December 1999.

All faculty are eligible to be nominated except for recipients of the award in the past four years: Andy Landis and Jorge Santiago-Blay (2014), Deborah Eicher-Catt and Jon Price (2015), Ali Kara and Walter Arnold (2016), and Orsay Kucukemiroglu and Gene Ellis (2017).

Two awards are given: one to a full-time faculty member and one to a part-time faculty member. Nominators do not need to determine whether a faculty member is full time or part time, the Teaching Award Committee will divide the nominations accordingly.

This nomination form is for faculty who are teaching in fall 2017. Comments about the nominees should be as specific as possible. When the committee receives something such as "she's a great professor and definitely deserves the award," it doesn't help much in making a decision.

Nominations should be submitted by 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 24 using the online form.

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