Five faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have been awarded Master Teacher status for connecting classroom activities to real world problems.

The 2004-2005 master teachers are: Clifford Bergman, professor of mathematics; William Gallus, associate professor of geological and atmospheric sciences; Jill Pruetz, assistant professor of anthropology; Michael Mendelson, professor of English, and Mark Rectanus, professor of foreign languages and literatures.

The LAS Master Teacher program is designed to recognize faculty members who use unique and effective teaching techniques.

This is the sixth year the college has presented the award.

Each year, the Master Teacher award focuses on a different theme; this year, it was connective learning, said Dave Gieseke, LAS program coordinator.

“[The Master Teachers] have been successful in a range of teaching activities that inspire and encourage connections to other disciplines or courses, to civic engagements and communities, to research, and to real world problems and solutions to those problems,” Gieseke said.

Connective learning stresses the importance of basic learning and the benefits of abstract learning, said Douglas Epperson, associate dean of LAS.

An example of connective learning would be teaching both calculus and the importance of calculus outside of class.

“Some teachers make those connections in an exemplary manner, and those are the teachers we are honoring,” Epperson said.

Gallus said he has worked to bring real-world issues into his meteorology classes through weather forecasting discussions and contests. He also has applied virtual reality to the meteorology program.

“We created a virtual reality tornadic thunderstorm,” he said.

Using video clips and photographs of real thunderstorms, Gallus worked with the Virtual Reality Applications Center to allow students to simulate studying an actual tornado in the field.

He also took students on a real-life storm chase and changed meteorology curriculum to meet the expectations of the National Weather Service.

Rectanus is the director of the Languages and Cultures for Professions program, which was established to give engineering and agriculture students the opportunity to declare a secondary major in a foreign language program.

Rectanus has also helped expand the internship and study abroad programs within the department and created courses that focus on the business world of Germany and the modern issues in German culture, media and politics.

Pruetz said she tries to make a connection between what she lectures about and what she studies.

Pruetz, a biological anthropologist, also studies humans as a biological species. As the only biological anthropologist at Iowa State, she has created two courses since 2001. The courses are “Primate Evolutionary Ecology and Behavior” and “Biological Anthropology Field School,” which she said, effectively integrate her research on primate ecology into the classroom.

Mendelson said she suspected her work in the English department’s learning community initiative earned her the award.

Mendelson has tripled the number of sections of the English learning community, from 20 to 64, in addition to doubling the number of departments linked to the community.

“That’s all about linking composition classes with courses in other disciplines,” Mendelson said.

Mendelson is also the director of ISUComm, which is developing two three-credit courses to replace English 104 and 105. Called WOVE courses, these courses would emphasize written, oral, visual and electronic communication mediums.

Bergman, a founding member of the ISU Information Assurance Center, developed the cryptography course that is an important part of the information assurance program.

He also organized a workshop for faculty members in other colleges to learn how to start their own information assurance programs.

As master teachers, the five faculty members will receive a research prize of $1000, Gallus said, as well as hold a faculty seminar on teaching methods.

The master teachers will be involved throughout the academic year in planning teaching method seminars and in-class demonstrations.

“The five of us who are master teachers are sort of on call in that we’re supposed to be open to try and help anybody that tries to contact us,” Gallus said.