Thurnau

When Thurnau Professor of Art Sadashi Inuzuka visited a colleague’s performance studies class to give a guest lecture, he began by handing each student a chunk of clay to work while he talked. The gift of clay invited students to engage their bodies in the process of thinking about land and their physical connection to it—an invitation they delightedly accepted as they kneaded the lumps into small forms that Inuzuka later fired and returned to them. Inuzuka is internationally renowned as an artist whose sculptures powerfully explore the relationships between humans and the natural world. But he is equally renowned among U-M colleagues and students as a remarkable teacher who can guide students, through such simple acts as handing them clay, to deeply embodied insights about the transformative social power of art.

The sheer breadth of Inuzuka’s teaching speaks to his flexibility as a teacher. But whether through his innovative drawing workshops for first-year medical students (designed to develop skills of observation as well as a comfort with loss of control), or his interdisciplinary course on environmental concerns in the Great Lakes region, Professor Inuzuka’s teaching consistently reflects two core pedagogical principles: 

• The artistic process creates community and provides tools for social engagement.
• Learning happens best when students are given the space to find their own methods, forms, and answers.

What if every college course had "curiosity" as an explicit prerequisite?  

When Bradford Orr introduced the course "Everyday Physics" into the University of Michigan curriculum in 1993, he included such a prerequisite on the syllabus. Moving away from the then-standard Physics pedagogy of lecture and textbook lessons, the course focused on "hands-on" discovery, as student groups performed lab experiments to study a series of everyday phenomena: soap bubbles, light waves, electrical circuits. The students worked with familiar materials to learn about the ways basic physical principles affect their daily lives--and can be observed and tested without elaborate equipment.  At the time a pioneering venture in curiosity-driven, experiential learning, the course continues to be the most popular elective in the U-M Physics curriculum.  

And Orr himself continues to be an extraordinarily innovative teacher. Honored in 2012 with an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship, his creative and committed instruction has also been acknowledged with a range of teaching awards, including the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP), a Rackham Graduate Student Mentoring Award, and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award.

While Orr's teaching continues to develop with every new course and semester, students repeatedly return to the fundamentals--instructor passion and student engagement--in their praise of his teaching.  They describe Orr as encouraging students to "actively think about the material instead of receiving it passively." They attest that he "demonstrates genuine concern for fostering a love of learning and discovery of new ideas for all students." And they praise his creation of a "learning environment . . . that prepares future physicists for the road ahead and opens all students to what 'real' science and physics is all about." Read more »

Imagine sitting in a fluid dynamics course as an undergraduate biomedical engineering student.  What teaching techniques could your instructor use to keep you engaged?  Students of Professor Joe Bull can tell you quite a bit about that question--and about great teaching in general.  In 2012 Professor Bull was honored with an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship, an award that recognizes outstanding undergraduate education at University of Michigan. 

Bull’s students might tell you that...

• he organizes each of his lectures around a practical problem that they can readily recognize as relevant to their everyday lives. Whereas many initially dread a course based around, say, the principles of biofluid dynamics, they quickly come to enjoy his clear lectures about how blood moves through chambers of the heart.
• his lectures are sometimes a "choose your own adventure" game, as he comes in with more than one outline prepared and decides upon the direction based on the questions students pose.
• he uses technology to stay connected with students. For example, during a term with demading travel obligations, he did not want to decrease his accessibility to students, so he used Google+ Hangouts to hold office hours.