Excellence in Teaching Awards are given to graduate students for instructional excellence as teaching assistants. Awardees receive $2,500.

Stephanie Tomlinson - Speech Communication

If things had worked out the way she'd originally planned, Stephanie Tomlinson would probably be standing at the front of a high school algebra class right now. Teaching has been her lifelong dream and early on she decided to follow in the footsteps of an excellent, "innovative" math teacher who'd had a great impact on her life. What happened? "I got up to third-year calculus," she says, "and decided I didn't like math anymore."

Stephanie Tomlinson

What to do? As an undergraduate at Pacific Lutheran University she considered going into broadcast journalism, but realized that it wasn't for her. Armed with her newly acquired knowledge of communication, she decided instead to return to her "first love," teaching. Tomlinson is now a graduate student in the Department of Speech Communication, where she has taught public speaking to undergraduates and is currently teaching a communication course for students who are planning to become teachers.

Her students certainly seem grateful that she didn't end up anchoring the evening news or grilling 10th-graders on the quadratic equation. Said one, "What can you give to express your gratitude to a teacher who has made such an impression on your life?" It was just this — to make a positive difference in the lives of her students — that first inspired her passion for teaching. "Initially that's what it was, and that's what keeps me going," she says. "Now that I'm in, I'm hooked!"

Tomlinson takes particular satisfaction in reaching the more tentative or reluctant students by getting to know them as individuals and relating what she teaches to their own interests. She recalls a student in the first public speaking class she taught who was extremely apprehensive about the idea of getting up in front of her classmates to give a speech. Tomlinson met with her outside of class, building her confidence and helping her overcome her fears. "We worked and worked and worked," she says, "and when she finally got up and gave her speech in front of the class, that was extremely rewarding for me. That's when I realized I really was making a difference."

Her efforts haven't gone unnoticed. Speech Communication Professor Ann Staton, who has, herself, been nominated several times for the Distinguished Teaching Award, calls her "a superb teacher . . . who engages students intellectually and challenges them, not only to understand course material, but to apply it. She brings ideas to life, finds the relevance in them, and encourages her students to do the same."

Tomlinson loves the field of communication, she says, because it is a balance between a rich theoretical foundation that can help us make sense of our world and a set of applicable skills that are "essential to all of our lives." Teaching Communication in the Classroom, a course for prospective teachers, has given her the perfect opportunity to delve into communication ideology and make it come alive for her students. The trick here is that she, as the teacher, must become a model of these ideas in practice. "I have to consciously integrate everything I am teaching my students about effective classroom communication into my own teaching." She explains. "That's definitely a unique challenge of this class." By all accounts, she is very successful. In an evaluation of the class, one student described Tomlinson as "a flawless example of what a perfect teacher should be."

She credits her mentor, Staton, for the greater part of her success. "She's an incredible teacher. If I can touch someone's life even half as much as she has touched mine then I will be successful." Tomlinson is the third of Staton's TAs to win the Excellence in Teaching Award. As for her initial reaction when she got the call from President McCormick notifying her that she had won? "I was speechless!" She laughs. "And very rarely am I speechless."

Tricia Kenealy, News & Information

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