Reitzel’s selection as outstanding professor honors both teaching and service learning

Winning a campus outstanding professor award is not normally a cause for a “Scholars and Scholarship” story. The communication discipline is blessed with outstanding teachers, and the “News and Notes” section of Spectra often carries one or more announcements of NCA members winning teaching awards.

But, Armeda (“Doc”) Reitzel, who recently won the outstanding professor award at Humboldt State University, the northernmost of twenty-three campuses of the California State University system, has an interesting story to tell. Not only is she the first communication professor to win the award at a campus that values most the hard sciences and environmental studies, but she won for her work with service learning. That work poses some interesting questions about how faculty in the communication discipline might work through Ernest Boyer’s ideas about a “scholarship of teaching.”

Many of the usual indicators are present: students are lined up at Reitzel’s door to see her during office hours, colleagues call her teaching “extraordinary,” and tell stories of her levels of preparation and dedication. It is clearly the service learning aspects of Reitzel’s teaching that stand out, however.

Many academics think of “service learning” as glorified internships, but communication faculty members have been incorporating community work into their classes for some time now. In fact, communication was selected, along with accounting, political science, and sociology, to be one of the four disciplines to lead the American Association for Higher Education’s service learning initiative. The idea of the “engaged” student and faculty member is popping up all over the country.

Reitzel teaches intercultural communication, English as a second language, and communication education, and she has integrated service learning into all of her courses. She even has integrated it into her sections of basic public speaking: her students often go to local elementary schools and teach public speaking to the children.

Another project that Reitzel’s students have worked on consistently has been the Hmong Homework Helper program. Students serve as tutors in this program aimed at schoolchildren from the local Hmong community, and they teach English as well as help the children with the content of their homework. In return, they learn from the students about Hmong culture, and Reitzel focuses class attention on how Hmong best learn English as a second language and what the differences in interacting with Hmong children can teach about intercultural communication more generally.

Ernest Boyer wrote in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, “While not all professors are likely to publish with regularity, they, nonetheless, should be first-rate scholars. We understand this to mean staying abreast of the profession, knowing the literature in one’s field, and skillfully communicating such information to students. To weaken faculty commitment to scholarship, as we define it here, is to undermine the undergraduate experience, regardless of the academic setting.

“Further, the results of such scholarship should be made available for judgment. There are many ways to do this: In addition to publishing books, monographs, or articles in journals, a scholar may write textbooks or perhaps be asked to review and assess recent key developments in one’s field. Regardless of the criteria used, scholarly activity should be evaluated by peers. How else can we judge whether a faculty member is staying professionally alive?”

Reitzel’s work seems to fit this model well. Her colleagues and members of the community knew about her work and wrote glowingly of it, concentrating on how well prepared Reitzel was for her classes and for community presentations. A master’s student in sociology commented on how helpful Reitzel was in learning about Hmong culture as a thesis committee member. The system-wide Chancellor’s Office asked her to help develop on-line service learning resources. Reitzel subjected herself to peer review for grant proposals to support her service learning work, winning funding from Stanford University’s Service Learning 2000 Center, and she was invited by the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide faculty development in multiculturalism and multilingualism in South Africa. Moreover, she brought her experiences back to her local community and provided public presentations on them.

And what of traditional scholarship? Reitzel’s vita lists papers available on the Internet, and she regularly contributes to conferences, especially those on English-language learning. But what seems to be at least as important is the fact that she volunteers at the local hospital on Sunday afternoons and that when her students are doing community service she is there doing it with them.

So, “Doc,” as her students call her, is an expert scholar-teacher, though certainly not either a traditional scholar nor a traditional teacher. Her recognition is a reminder that we, as communication scholars and teachers, need to continue to have a dialogue about what it means to be an outstanding scholar-teacher in the discipline.