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Distinguished Teaching Awards
David Domke
Erika Goldstein
James Green
John Peterson
Priti Ramamurthy
Barry Witham
Carol Zander

Excellence in Teaching Awards
Chia-Hui Huang
Steve Wolfman

Distinguished Staff Awards
Brian Davis & James Boeckstiegel
Gary Ausman
Felicia Hecker
Sandra Kroupa
Keith Ward

Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award
Thomas Daniel

S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award
Sergio Palleroni

Outstanding Public Service Award
Anita Ramasastry

Brotman Diversity Award
Business Educational Opportunity Program
Student Outreach Ambassador Program

Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence
Dance Program
Research Apprenticeship Program

Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award
Geoff & Judy Vernon

Alumna Summa Laude Dignatus
Donald Baker

UW Recognition Award
ARCS Foundation, Seattle Chapter

President's Medalist
Roy Chan

James Green, Anthropology

Distinguished Teaching Award

The Distinguished Teaching Awards are given to University faculty who show a mastery of their subject matter, intellectual rigor and a passion for teaching

It is not hyperbole to say that some students are dying to get into one of the anthropology classes James Green teaches.

It doesn’t matter if the class is Anthro 100, the introductory course that draws hundreds of students every quarter; Anthro 322, his course on comparative death that attracts a turn-away enrollment each time it is offered; or Anthro 599, a required class that all anthropology teaching assistants must take before they are allowed to teach.

Any class that Green teaches draws a crowd, but that’s not surprising.

“Jim is without a doubt the most accomplished teacher in our department,” says Eugene Hunn, the acting chair of anthropology.

“What strikes me most about Jim is how much he truly loves what he does,” adds Miriam Kahn, the anthropology chair who is currently on sabbatical. “He always talks about how much fun it is to teach and he always is the first to volunteer for anything teaching-related that I ask of the faculty.”

Now a senior lecturer, Green has always made teaching the focus of his UW career, which has covered nearly three decades. It’s his way of replicating his experience as an undergraduate.

“I had teachers who took a personal interest in me and who encouraged me,” he says. “I try to be approachable and I am interested in their intellectual growth and maturity. In anthropology 101 I try to teach anthropology as less than a grand truth but rather as a useful way to think about their lives.

“I try to think about what is of concern to freshmen at that point in their lives and what in anthropology would be useful to them. I want to give students a set of tools relevant to their concerns. This course is very oriented toward what makes us human beings. We talk about evolution and issues of race and gender. I’m not shy about dealing with controversial issues and we talk about Darwin and creationism or gender varieties that exist in human societies, not just male and female.”

In teaching, Green tries to move beyond the traditional 50-minute lecture. Instead he looks at each classroom lesson as telling a story, a technique he says he learned from other faculty and TAs.

“It has a beginning, a middle and an end. And somewhere in it I want students to react and respond. I might ask a provocative question and have students talk to each other and then integrate their responses into the rest of the class,” he says.

For example, during an exploration of marriage patterns in different cultures he might ask students to assume they live in a culture that permits having a second spouse. Then he would ask them to consider what they would look for in a second spouse, how they would smooth it over with their first spouse and have a class dialog on the topic.

“By doing it this way the topic is not just abstract, but something they have thought about and how it might work for them. It engages students so they are not just taking notes. People need to articulate these kinds of ideas for them to jell in their brains,” he says.

Green is perhaps best known for his fabulously successful Comparative Study of Death class, which is offered once a year, usually in the spring. Green created the class in the mid-1990s in response to student requests. He used to team-teach a class on aging that included a lecture on death. In their evaluations, students asked for a class exploring death.

When he got permission to teach it a colleague kidded him that it would only attract “10 weird people.” He got 50 students the first year. Then enrollment jumped to between 60 and 75 and now it regularly attracts between 90 and 115 people.

“A lot of student have compelling reasons to be in the class,” says Green. “It draws widows under age 30, people who have had a sibling commit suicide, witnesses to violence in the Third World, people who are dealing with a parent’s or grandparent’s death and some elderly students. There are not a lot of places in our culture to talk about death.”

While students may view an autopsy, see a video about an embalming, visit cemeteries and talk about Dr. Jack Kevorkian and body disposal in different cultures, the course is not a downer.

“I try to teach it in as upbeat a way as possible,” he says. “I go out of my way not to make it morbid. Every class starts with a cartoon. It puts people in a mood not to have long faces.”

Green wants students in the death class and any course he teaches to come away with a critical sensibility of what goes on in the rest of their lives.

“I want them to have learned something that is applicable to their lives or to the lives of their significant other, not just exotic information. I want them to know why life in the U.S. is the way it is, and to have the capacity to understand other cultures.”

– Joel Schwarz
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