The School of Education’s Erica Halverson and Kate Vieira are two of 13 faculty members from across campus to be recognized with a 2020 UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award, which are designed to recognize the university’s finest educators.
Halverson, who was honored with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, is a professor with the School of Education’s highly ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Vieira, an associate professor with the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy, received a Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award.
In recognizing Halverson, the university notes that her work focuses on teaching and learning in and through the arts. From First-Year Interest Groups to graduate-level courses, Halverson is known for challenging her students to understand themselves and the world differently.
Halverson designed and teaches “Arts Integration for Teaching and Learning,” a unique course that engages future elementary school teachers in understanding and using various art forms in their teaching. The students learn to create art that represents their experiences and to think about how they might bring the arts into their future classrooms – not only for arts’ sake, but in support of core concepts like reading and math.
In honoring Vieira, the university explains how her work focuses on issues of literacy among everyday people, especially those at the margins of society. She explores literacy and writing as a means of social change.
Her outreach work has taken her to Colombia, where she has worked with community members using writing to help people build peace after the violence of a decades-long civil war. Locally, Vieira has forged connections between South American Educators and the Madison community. Two of her collaborators from Colombia visited last May to co-lead workshops at East and West high schools, meet with local Latinx writers, and share pedagogical practices with representatives of the Greater Madison Writing Project.
To learn about all of this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award winners from across campus check out this University Communications report.