Champagne and Jenkins Win Teaching Fellow Award

March 20, 2003
University Park, Pa.  --- Dr. John Champagne, associate professor of English, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and Dr. Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of religious studies and history, College of The Liberal Arts, University Park, have won the 2003 Penn State Teaching Fellow Award:  The Alumni/Student Award for Excellence in Teaching.

            Dr. Champagne writes, "I am a teacher of reading and writing.  My courses attempt to teach students how to be attentive to texts, how to produce an interpretation out of that attentiveness, and how to share that interpretation with another reader."

            His students say that he succeeds admirably.  In support of Champagne's nomination, one student recalled a class that required the close reading of seven novels, a dense academic text on capitalism and an equally difficult essay.  The student wrote, "I'm able to reproduce such detail so long after the fact because I still have all the syllabi, assignments and essays I wrote in John's courses.   I consider this record of my learning and the ideas to which I was introduced to be of such significant personal value that I would not willingly part with it."

            A colleague wrote that Champagne's teaching exemplifies education in its etymological sense – drawing forth knowledge from students in a way that facilitates their thinking and learning. 

            Champagne has also been honored with Penn State's Council for Fellows Teaching Award and Behrend's Benjamin Lane Outstanding Teaching Award.  He is the author of the book, The Ethics of Marginality, A New Approach to Gay Studies, and of numerous scholarly articles, essays, conference papers and invited lectures on literary criticism, film criticism and cultural studies as well as two published novels, When the Parrot Boy Sings and The Blue Lady's Hands. He is also a past chairman of the President's Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equity. 

            Dr. Jenkins is one of Penn State's most visible faculty members.  The author of 18 books on the history of religion and other topics, he is a frequent guest on television and radio, including National Public Radio, and his research-informed opinions on pedophiles and priests, Christianity and new religions are quoted extensively in U.S. newspapers and magazines   and and by the Vatican.   In addition, last year, he published major articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post to help make his research of service to the widest possible audience.

Along with research and service, Dr. Jenkins pursues teaching with equal vigor.   He has created several new graduate courses.  He frequently offers Honors/University Scholars courses as well as large undergraduate survey courses in both Religious Studies and History.  He routinely receives high student ratings for all of them, even the large lecture sections.

            A colleague, who invited Jenkins to lecture on the Protestant Reformation in a survey course on western civilization, notes, "Phil conjured the lecture hall alternately into a Catholic church, with its altar and images, and then into a Protestant church with its deliberate simplicity.  In these 'settings' he dramatized the differences in liturgy and expounded on their meanings.  The lecture mesmerized the class and demonstrated how a large lecture course could, indeed, probably should, be handled."

            Jenkins is highlighted as one of Penn State's 'exceptional professors' in the guidebook, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools.

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Contact:  Barbara Hale,  (814)-865-9481 or at bah@psu.edu