Two OIBR Affiliates Named 2022 Meigs Professors
University of Georgia faculty members have been named Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professors, the university’s highest recognition for excellence in instruction.
“Meigs Professors are an elite group of faculty members at an institution that places a great value on outstanding instruction,” said S. Jack Hu, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “I congratulate the recipients of this significant honor and thank them for their exemplary dedication to our students.”
Rebecca Matthew
Rebecca Matthew (Photo by Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA)
Matthew, OIBR Affiliate and associate professor in the School of Social Work, has a distinguished record of teaching excellence and an abiding commitment to mentoring students. Her pedagogy centers on community-based and experiential learning approaches, which allow students to apply key concepts in the study of social work in real-world settings.
Matthew co-led an experiential interdisciplinary educational collaboration with the Athens Well-Being Project. She supervised a team of 79 master’s-level social work students in the collection of primary, open-access, neighborhood-level data that has supported ongoing efforts to improve community health. She led 34 students in experiential learning activities that supported the Athens Community Partnership for Youth Development. She is also a co-convener and faculty advisor for the student-coordinated Athens Social Justice Symposium, which received the 2016 UGA NAACP Image Award for Advocacy and Social Justice.
Matthew has a courtesy appointment in the department of health promotion and behavior in the College of Public Health and is a faculty fellow in the Center for Social Justice, Human and Civil Rights. She also served as the coordinator of the LACSI-PORTAL Latino Research and Outreach Initiative in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.
She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Career Development and Success Recognition Award and six-time School of Social Work MSW Teacher of the Year.
Sarah Shannon
Sarah Shannon (Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski/UGA)
OIBR Affiliate, Sarah Shannon, associate professor of sociology, provides her students with innovative active learning courses and engages students through a holistic mentoring model. Her commitment to mentoring has played a pivotal role in helping students discover their passions and talents.
Shannon’s teaching excellence is evident in her service-learning course, Inside-Out. This course brings UGA students together with people who are incarcerated at the local jail in a shared learning environment. Her students describe this as the most meaningful academic and social experiences of their college careers.
Shannon also currently serves as undergraduate coordinator in the department of sociology. She has trained and mentored 16 undergraduate students through the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities program. Along with this role, she is also an enthusiastic mentor to graduate students in the department. Shannon is especially devoted to securing funding for research assistants and developing them as academic researchers.
Shannon is the recipient of numerous university awards and honors, including the Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award, the Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Award, the Service-Learning Fellowship, the Special Collections Library Fellowship and the Lilly Teaching Fellowship.
More information about the Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professorships is at http://provost.uga.edu/resources/faculty-resources/professorships/josiah-meigs-distinguished-teaching-professorships/.
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