Interim Executive Dean David Horn, Dean of Arts and Humanities Dana Renga and Interim Chair Susan Van Pelt Petry surprised Professor Norah Zuniga Shaw at the Spring 2022 Department Gathering held on Zoom on January 10, 2022, with a presentation of the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award. 

“The Ratner Awards recognize faculty for making a difference in students' educations, lives and careers. Candidates are chosen for creative teaching and exemplary records of engaging, motivating and inspiring students,” according to the award website. “Each Ratner Award includes a $10,000 cash prize, as well as a $15,000 teaching account to fund future projects.”

Professor Shaw will use the award “to pilot a new experiential learning course called Livable Futures for student research and creative inquiry at the intersection of our bodies, our technologies, and our ecologies,” says Shaw. “Responding to the urgency of climate change and global inequities, the Livable Futures course will foster creative solutions for survival under planetary conditions of unpredictability and crisis. Students will be guided in creating individual and collaborative socially engaged research projects. The course will be strengthened by my own research interest in performance ecology and professional experience in interdisciplinary collaboration.”

“We don’t know what our students will need to know in the days to come but we can teach them to ask good questions and give them the tools to investigate complex problems collaboratively,” continues Shaw. “This is at the heart of all my teaching and my proposed plan for the teaching funds offered by a Ratner award. In the face of COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, public reckoning with persistent racism, sexism, and homophobia, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and even powerless. By turning toward what we fear and centering creative inquiry instead of apathy; curiosity and questions, instead of assumptions; we stoke the fires of creative action and discovery.”

Livable Futures will be offered for undergraduate and graduate students under the Dance 4290/6290 and listed at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and in the new Environmental Studies Minor.