Denise Bostdorff receives national award for teaching excellence

Denise Bostdorff, professor of communication studies at The College of Wooster, has received a national award in recognition of her teaching.

The National Communication Association (NCA) named Bostdorff the 2024 recipient of the Donald H. Ecroyd Award for Outstanding Teaching in Higher Education. The award honors superlative teaching of communication at the postsecondary level and is the highest honor for college professors in the field. Bostdorff’s award will be presented during the NCA 110^th Annual Convention Nov. 21-24 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She exemplifies “superlative teaching in higher education—through her classrooms, academic advising, her scholarship of teaching and learning, and her role as a public intellectual of pedagogy for her community,” said one of her nominators for the Ecroyd award. Her students acknowledge her unmatched passion, unparalleled dedication, ability to challenge students to be their best, and inspirational character as a role model.

Bostdorff, who joined the Wooster communication studies faculty in 1994, has earned numerous teaching and mentoring awards. Most recently, she received Wooster’s Experiential Learning Faculty/Staff Award in 2023, which recognizes a faculty or staff member who has demonstrated a sustained commitment to facilitating opportunities for students to engage in high-impact experiential learning activities. She was co-advisor with Michelle Johnson of Wooster’s Lambda Pi Eta, which won the NCA Chapter of the Year in 2022 and previously in 1997. The College’s Democrats of Ohio student organization was Chapter of the Year in 2013 under her leadership. In 2019, she was a top four finalist for Best College Advisor EXPY Award, sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education.

“Receiving the Ecroyd Award is immensely satisfying because it is based on a lifetime of teaching and on the letters and evaluations of professional colleagues and former and current students,” Bostdorff said. “As a teacher, I frequently focus on what I want to do better, so it’s gratifying to be reminded there is also a lot I’m getting right.”

Bostdorff led an experiential learning trip to Alabama with some students from her Rhetoric of Black Civil Rights course in 2023, demonstrating how her lessons bring to life the intricate ties between coursework and the real-world consequences of language and politics. “I saw first-hand the impacts of the civil rights speeches, writings, and songs we studied in class, learning through the perspectives of other local community members and civil rights activists,” said Audrey Pantaz ’25, an English and French major, who participated in the trip.

Wooster’s generous leave program and support for academic research have contributed to Bostdorff’s professional scholarship and “made me a better teacher,” she said. Bostdorff and the Department of Communication Studies have focused on experiential learning from the start, so the College’s embrace of experiential learning in recent years is especially gratifying. “The fact this award notes my longtime involvement in experiential learning is certainly an endorsement of this approach,” Bostdorff said.

Featured image: Bostdorff engages with students from her Rhetoric of Black Civil Rights course after crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, part of an experiential learning course she taught in 2023.

Posted in Homepage Featured, News on November 11, 2024.