Eight Northern Michigan University faculty members were honored at the recent Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship celebration.
Award recipients were: Loganne Glendening and Monica McFawn, Excellence in Teaching; Jean Essila and Rick Mengyan, Excellence in Scholarship; Rebecca Ulland, Faculty Leadership; James Marquardson, Technology Innovation; Abby Cameron-Standerford, Excellence in Online Teaching; and Nancy Gold, Excellence in Part-time Teaching.
Glendening has 13 years of industry and six years of teaching experience in the hospitality and tourism industry. She is the NMU program's certifying instructor for both Michigan sanitation and alcohol food safety. Glendening is also an NMU alumna, holding both a bachelor's in hospitality management and a master's in training and human performance improvement. She plays an active role in advising the NMU Hospitality Club and works as a local “beertender” in her free time to keep touch with the industry.
McFawn is an associate professor of English and also serves as director of the MFA program in creative writing. She teaches courses in fiction, drama and scriptwriting, and writing for TV. Several of McFawn's students have gone on to publish their own work. Her collection of short stories, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, won the Flannery O'Connor Award from the University of Georgia Press and a Michigan Notable Book Award. She has published numerous short stories and her scripts have been performed in New York, Chicago and other cities.
Essila is an assistant professor in the College of Business. His research interests include the impact of enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) on modern manufacturing operations' effectiveness and efficiency; electronic supply chains' operational effectiveness and their impact on strategic organizational outcome; and the impact of active learning strategies on student performance. He recently gave a presentation at the European Academy of Management in Lisbon, Portugal. Essila's most recent book, “Managing Operation throughout Global Supply Chains,” was published in June.
Mengyan is an assistant professor whose expertise is in experimental condensed matter physics. He was not able to attend the awards ceremony because he was at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom for a research project. According to Mengyan's website, one of his interests is investigating the microscopic distribution of magnetic fields within magnetic semiconducting materials with the prospects of potential applications in spin electronics.
Ulland is a professor in the Languages, Literatures and International Studies Department. She was elected director of the gender and sexuality studies program in fall 2014 and has increased the number of students in the minor—doubling enrollment over a two-year period—and enhanced student involvement while providing opportunities for students to attend national conferences. Ulland also served as both president and vice president of Feministas Unidas, an international coalition of feminist scholars.
Marquardson is an assistant professor in information assurance and cyber defense who previously worked for ExxonMobil's information technology department in Houston. His research includes the development of non-contact systems for credibility assessment, human-computer interaction, information security compliance and pedagogical considerations for cyber defense education. He contributed to the formation of the U.P. Cybersecurity Institute and has helped deliver training to high school students. He also helped to create an associate degree program, a middle college offering and a newly proposed certificate in cyber defense.
Standerford is an associate professor and director of the graduate learning disabilities program. She teaches online courses in support of effective pedagogy for meeting the needs of exceptional learners. Her research examines universal design, differentiated instruction, capacity building pedagogy, online learning, multi-modal literacies and self-study methodology as a framework to improve teaching and learning. Her scholarship is redefining clinical partnerships with schools and revolutionizing how NMU's educator preparation program utilizes online platforms to assess teaching and learning in authentic learning environments.
Gold has been teaching part-time for NMU since 2013. Her courses include composition, developmental composition and good books. She continually updates her teaching methods and has participated in several workshops, including NMU's Online Teaching Fellows Initiative and the U.P. Teaching and Learning Conference. Gold contributes to the university by serving on the English Department's executive and composition committees. She has also published several pieces of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in national literary magazines.