Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award

Two Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Awards are presented each year in honor and recognition of meritorious and sustained records of excellence in teaching and creativity related to teaching to two full-time faculty members of the University of Nebraska. Both awards may be made to the same campus in a given year.

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Past Recipients

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2008 Award Winners

Dr. Donna Dufner, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis in the College of Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha

Dr. Dufner exemplifies the qualities of an exceptional university teacher with her superior academic knowledge, innovative teaching methods, caring attitude toward her students and scholarly activity. She is an imaginative, devoted and resourceful teacher committed to her students and her community. But she is perhaps most recognized for exploring new and impressive service learning courses, ways to integrate community service into valuable learning experiences for her students. For example, Dufner created an Information Science and Quantitative Analysis course that brings UNO students to south Omaha to help small business entrepreneurs improve their information management and marketing skills. In another educational experience, Dufner developed a course in which her students teach basic literacy skills to inmates at the Douglas County Correctional Facility. A talented and innovative teacher, she inspires her students to be better scholars but also better human beings and citizens of Omaha.



Dr. Theresa A. Wadkins, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology in the College of Natural and Social Sciences at the University of Nebraska at Kearney

Dr.Wadkins is an exemplary teacher-scholar at UNK who has made major contributions to instructional creativity in her role as a classroom teacher, mentor of undergraduate research, journal reviewer, and scholar in teaching and learning. Over the past several years Wadkins has mentored more than 40 undergraduate projects, helping students to articulate the initial research idea, conduct the study, analyze the data and prepare the paper for presentation. But perhaps what moves Wadkins to the next level are her innovative endeavors within the realm of teaching, developing unique and highly effective teaching tools. One summer she built an entire course in abnormal psychology completely around popular movies. More recently she developed creative review tools such as Psych Feud and Psych Jeopardy to help students understand some complex psychological concepts. Wadkins is an enthusiastic teacher who has an enviable record of scholarly research on teaching issues, has conducted a number of empirical studies of the teaching/learning process and has been a solid contributor to the scholarly teaching model that characterizes UNK.