Julia Wood wins CASE award for scholarly teaching

Julia Wood is quick to point out that there are many communication scholars who bring their research and writing to the classroom.  But she’s the only one who recently won a national teaching award for doing so.

In October, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Princeton, N.J., named Julia T. Wood Professor of the Year for North Carolina.  She was nominated automatically after having been selected as the Board of Governors outstanding professor for the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill last spring.

Although Wood points out that faculty at Research I universities are supposed to teach from scholarship, she also insists that “scholarship and teaching are never oppositional.”  In fact, a number of Wood’s projects have come from class discussions.  A paper that Wood and Chris Inman published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research challenging traditional views of men’s friendships was spurred by a heated debate in her undergraduate course on gender, communication, and culture, and her latest book, on misunderstandings, resulted from a reading on the topic that didn’t work in one of her classes.  Above all, Wood aims to engage students in current ideas so that they are able to discuss, challenge, and think.

Wood teaches three courses at the undergraduate level: Communication and Personal Relationships; Introduction to Interpersonal Communication; and Gender Communication and Culture.  At the graduate level she teaches Feminist Research in Communication and a seminar in Communication in Personal Relationships.  Until recently, Chapel Hill has been a master’s-only program, but the faculty has recently begun a doctoral program and Wood expects to be teaching in that program as well.

Her philosophy of teaching sounds a lot like that of a scholar: “I create a frame for putting information into, and then having loose ends seems to be only a challenge, rather than a frustration.”  She uses the motto “tentatively firmly” to imply that ideas need to be held open to change, while encouraging students to hold firmly to their basic beliefs.  And, one of her basic beliefs is that scholarly teaching should not be dull or inaccessible.  “A teacher’s job is to open up the conversation and show how research content brings ideas into focus,” Wood said.

Wood credits her doctoral mentor, Gerald Phillips, with inspiring her to do what she does.  She quotes Phillips as telling his students, “Find a context that rewards what you like doing.”  And, in colleagues at UNC she has found that.  She particularly credits her former and current chairs, Beverly Whitaker Long and Bill Balthrop, with insisting on excellent teaching, along with scholarly productivity and modeling such behavior themselves.

Finally, Wood finds it satisfying that she has won an equal number of awards for her teaching as for her scholarship.  And, she has impressed the same on campus administrators.  As UNC Chancellor Michael Hooker said in presenting her with the CASE award, “Your highly interactive classes, understanding of and devotion to the mentoring process and your very heartfelt concern for the student as an individual are all earmarks of a great teacher.  Add to those qualities your outstanding research and scholarship on interpersonal and gender communication and your many award-winning books on these subjects and it is certainly no surprise that you were selected North Carolina Professor of the Year.”