News Release

September 11, 2001

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Oakton Faculty Members Awarded for Teaching Excellence

Anthropology and geography professor Victoria Giambrone and Brady Carey, of the Speech, Theatre and Performing Arts Department, recently received the 2001 Ray Hartstein Award for Outstanding and Professional Excellence in Teaching awarded by Oakton Community College, Des Plaines.

Named for the founding chairman of Oakton's Board of Trustees, Ray Hartstein, the award is given annually to a full-time and a part-time faculty member who demonstrate excellence in teaching and respect for their students and peers. Oakton students and colleagues nominate faculty members for the award. A committee of the Board of Student Affairs then reviews the nominee applications and submits a list of finalists to the Oakton Educational Foundation, which makes the final selection.

Giambrone, a Chicago resident, earned a bachelor of arts degree from Northern Illinois University as well as master of arts degrees from University Wisconsin-Madison and Northeastern Illinois University. An Oakton faculty member since 1998, she was the recipient of a NISOD award, which honors teaching excellence and has earned praise for her "hands on" approach to learning. Giambrone enjoys a passion for cultural anthropology, which she says was first stoked in grade school when she saw King Tut's tomb on exhibit at the Field Museum. Since then, she has participated in excavations at a Mayan site in Copan, Honduras, and throughout Wisconsin. Her main focus in the classroom, she says, is to develop a two-way avenue of communication with her students.

"I encourage students from other cultural traditions to share their experiences with the class," she says. "When they do, and I see other students come to understand, tolerate and appreciate diversity, it makes what I do worthwhile."

Part-time instructor Brady Carey, an Evanston resident, believes his role as an educator is to reinforce the classroom as a "marketplace of ideas" where students can speak their minds and learn about others in the class. Carey names Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, W.B. Yeats and Benjamin Bloom as thinkers who have profoundly influenced and shaped his thinking as it applies to the classroom. As a speech and public speaking teacher, he encourages students to interpret other opinions objectively. He adheres to his own philosophy of learning where students are not viewed as "blank slates" to be filled with information. Rather, Carey assumes they possess the skills required to effectively process information and only need to access those tools in order to become critical thinkers.

"All I can do is help them understand the process and they must fit it into their own cognitive structure,"says Carey. "I stand to learn as much from their experiences as they can from mine. I believe strongly that learning is best attained by doing. My overall goal as an instructor is to facilitate a receptive environment where everyone can have equal access to learning."

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