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Alan Fox named Delaware Professor of the Year
2:55 p.m., Nov. 16, 2006--Alan Fox, associate professor of philosophy, is in Washington, D.C., today to attend a luncheon and reception where he was honored as the 2006 Delaware Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In the letter announcing the award, Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, and John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), wrote Fox, saying “Our heartiest congratulations to you on this outstanding achievement and to your institution, as well.” Fox said he was grateful to be nominated by UD and was surprised and pleased to be selected for the honor. The award is recognized as one of the most prestigious honors a professor can receive and is given on both state and national levels to university faculty who exhibit outstanding undergraduate teaching techniques. Fox's field is Asian and comparative philosophy and religion, in both his teaching and research, focusing in part on Buddhism in China and India. He said he first became interested in Asian thought during a Chinese martial arts course he took in graduate school. He speaks Chinese fluently and spent a year doing graduate study in Taiwan as a Fulbright Hayes Scholar. In a statement about his teaching required for the award, Fox wrote he was including more use of multimedia computer support and other media resources in his courses, but that “guiding my use of this technology and paraphernalia is my mission to cultivate what I feel is the students' innate capacity to think clearly for themselves and to take responsibility for their own thinking. Among other things, this means they are encouraged to challenge the views of the author and instructor.” Fox doesn't drop names but remembers them. By mid-semester he said he knows the names of all his students, which may number more than 300. He is working on a textbook based on a fundamental Chinese work, Dao De Jing, and is beginning another project to develop his world religions course into a hypertext multimedia computer textbook. Fox concluded his statement by writing, “I love to teach. I love to get students to wake up and think for themselves, and so the excitement is still there in every class I teach.” Fred Adams, chairperson of the philosophy department, who nominated Fox for the award, calls him a “fabulous teacher.” “In the philosophy department, we ask students to rate professors on a scale of 1 to 5, and Alan consistently gets a 5 rating from students, which is unusual,” Adams said. “One student wrote, 'Fox rocks,' and others praised him for opening their eyes to other religions and philosophies. I have visited his class to observe what was going on. He holds the class in the palm of his hand and keeps them on track in a nonthreatening way. His students are devoted to him, and several take as many classes of his as they can.” A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Fox received his master's and doctoral degrees in religious studies from Temple University. He received UD's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995 and again in 2006 and the Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award in 1999. Article by Sue Moncure |
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