2019 Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching

DCAL is delighted to announce the winner of the 2019 Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. This year's award goes to Timothy Baker, Paul Carranza, Michelle Clarke, Carolyn Dever, Antonio Gomez, Klaus Mladek, Kristin O'Rourke, Julia Rabig, and Andrea Tarnowski for their work on the Humanities sequence (HUM 1 and HUM 2).  

The Apgar Award recognizes and supports innovative teaching initiatives that cross traditional academic boundaries. The award is aimed at team-taught, interdisciplinary courses, particularly those offered by faculty at an early stage of their careers and particularly faculty in the Arts and Humanities. A gift from Mahlon Apgar, IV D'62 and Sarah Tipper Apgar, Tu'11 made this award possible. The endowment for this prize provides a modest cash prize to each of the faculty teaching the course selected for the award.

Andrea Tarnowski, who led the design and coordination of the sequence, created a truly integrative and collaborative experience across multiple sections of the same course. These sections are aligned to the same syllabus, content, and evaluation so that they can function in small as well as large groups.  The full group – all faculty and all students – come together in about one class meeting per week to work together, building both intellectual and social cohesion. During the other two weekly class meetings, individual faculty convene their section of 16 students in a seminar setting for small-group discussion. These multiple modalities create opportunities for students to build close relationships as well as develop a larger community of inquiry. 

Learning objectives include learning to read closely and critically; approaching works in their historical and intellectual contexts; observe, articulate, and interpret connections among the works studied;  write clearly and convincingly, formulating and elaborating an argument; engagement with faculty and each other in a collective intellectual endeavor; and moving through a progression of writing techniques.

The Apgar Award at Dartmouth is the latest in the Awards for Excellence program that was begun by Sandy and Anne Apgar in 1982 and is presented annually at 15 leading educational and cultural institutions and professional organizations. The Apgar Award recognizes and supports innovative teaching initiatives that cross traditional academic boundaries. It is aimed at proposals for team-taught, interdisciplinary courses, particularly those offered by faculty at an early stage of their careers and particularly faculty in the Arts and Humanities. A gift from Mahlon Apgar, IV D'62 and Sarah Tipper Apgar, Tu'11 made this award possible.