Each spring, the School of Education recognizes some of its most outstanding individuals with Faculty and Staff Distinguished Achievement Awards. On Thursday, April 14, this year’s award winners were honored during a reception and short ceremony in the Education Building’s Wisconsin Idea Room.
“Today we recognize an extraordinary group of people,” said School of Education Dean Diana Hess at the start of the ceremony. “These awards are special for a couple of reasons. One is that we are giving awards to faculty, staff, and students, and it is faculty, staff, and students that make the School of Education so great.”
“The second thing,” she added, “is that all of these awards came about because colleagues nominated the people winning the awards … and they’ve taken the time to write, often very extensive, letters of nomination, and I really think that makes these awards quite special.”
The 2022 award winners are:
Ann Wallace Academic Staff Distinguished Achievement Awards
Danielle Maillette, Wisconsin Center for Education Research
Tim O’Neill, Art
Maria Widmer, MERIT
University Staff Distinguished Achievement Award
Claire Carlson, Communications and Advancement
Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award
Lesley Bartlett, Educational Policy Studies
Sadhana Puntambekar, Educational Psychology
Student Staff Distinguished Achievement Awards
Jenna Harb, Morgridge Center
Regan Trinastic, Educational Psychology
Award for Community-Engaged Scholarship
Luis Columna, Kinesiology
Excellence in Diversity Award
Stephanie Budge, Counseling Psychology
Learn more about all of this year’s award winners.
This year’s event also included recognition of the inaugural recipients of the School of Education’s Staff Innovation Awards. Supported by Impact 2030, these awards seek to provide staff members with funds to develop exciting and innovative new initiatives that will have a positive impact on the School community.
Three School of Education staff teams were recognized at the awards reception:
The first team includes Kaycee Rogers, Mark Olson, Tom Owenby, Joey Lubasi, Dawn Lemirand-Poepping, and Jennifer Murphy from the secondary education teacher preparation program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. They were recognized for their initiative, “Assessing Teacher Candidate Development through Socially Just Community Engagement,” which will focus on learning more about mediating and assessing teacher candidates’ learning around socially just teacher preparation through community engagement. They aim to strengthen their community partnerships, support learning opportunities, and coordinate an internal team-based learning symposium where team members will share what they’ve learned and identify next steps.
The second team includes Heather Good and Jennifer Krug, who are administrators in the School of Education’s Dance and Educational Psychology departments, respectively. Their initiative, the “Department Administrators Toolbox,” will develop a web-based toolbox of resources that will support staff from across the 10 academic departments to do their jobs more effectively, efficiently, and joyfully.
And finally, the third team includes Sarah Maughan, Todd Finkelmeyer, and Felipe Gacharná from the Office of Communications and Advancement. This team’s work, titled “Graduates Impacting Their Communities: A Documentary Series,” will involve creating a video series featuring School of Education alumni outside of Dane County to spotlight the School’s graduates and the impact they are having on their communities.