Hayya And Secor Win Graduate Faculty Teaching Awards

3-28-96
University Park, Pa. --- Jack C. Hayya, professor of management science, and Marie Secor, associate professor of English, are the 1996 winners of Penn State's Graduate Faculty Teaching Awards.

The award recognizes tenured faculty members who have excelled both in teaching at the graduate level and in supervising thesis work of graduate students. They will be honored at the Faculty/Staff Awards ceremony on Sunday, March 31, at the Nittany Lion Inn.

Dr. Hayya has taught courses in business statistics and operations management at the graduate level and directed the research of 20 doctoral candidates and about 10 master's candidates. His former students have gone on to become deans and department heads at universities across the U.S. as well as captains of industry.

In recommending him for the award, his former students noted that Hayya takes an intensive pedagogical approach. He is always on the job with them, they said, even after they graduate.

Dr. Hayya also emphasizes the value of precise communication to his students. He makes a special effort to critique and work with students on their writing.

A specialist in aspects of inventory theory, Dr. Hayya has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1967. He was honored in 1989 with the First Achievement in Diversity Award presented by the Penn State College of Business minority staff and students. He is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) and was elected to a two year term as Vice-President-at-Large of the organization in 1992. He currently serves DSI as a member of the Planning Committee for International Affairs.

In the past five years, Dr. Marie Secor has directed six doctoral candidates' dissertations and has placed four of those students in tenure track faculty positions at research universities. She has served or is serving on another 16 dissertation committees and has supervised more than a dozen M.A. theses.

Dr. Secor's students are in demand because of the training she has given them in rhetorical studies. She has assumed leadership in establishing rhetorical studies at Penn State. The University's program is one of the few in the nation to focus on the intersection of rhetoric with both composition theory and literary theory. Specialists in rhetorical studies examine how texts are generated and how and why they have been shaped to achieve their goals.

Students point to Dr. Secor's freewheeling seminars in rhetorical theory and Victorian fiction as sources for their dissertation topics. In her seminars, the class becomes a roundtable discussion among equals in which she encourages the students to clarify their thoughts and often pushes their inquiries to unanticipated conclusions. These interchanges help students to gain focus on their work and discover what truly interests them about a particular novel or rhetorical text.

The long seminar essay she requires in her seminars often constitutes the student's first professional product. In the course of one-on-one discussions with her, the students learn to situate themselves in the critical discourse of the profession and come to understand what will lead to a publishable article.

Dr. Secor has previously been honored with the Provost's Award for Collaborative Teaching and the Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Award. She served as an Alumni Teaching Fellow in 1990-91 and earned the Liberal Arts Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985. She has also been recognized as an Honorary Faculty Member in Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society, an Outstanding Faculty Member by Golden Key National Honor Society, and Outstanding Woman Faculty by the Pan-Hellenic Council.

**bah**