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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Annette Leopard is Recipient of 2008-2009 Outstanding WAC Faculty Award


The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program’s success is due not just to its mission but to the faculty who design their courses to be Writing Intensive (WR). Their dedication and devotion help sustain our efforts to keep WAC thriving at MCC. Eight years ago, the WAC Committee created an annual award to honor an individual faculty member who has made a significant contribution to the development of WAC at the College. The Committee is pleased to recognize Annette Leopard, Associate Professor of Mathematics, for the 2008-09 Outstanding WAC Faculty Award.

Annette has been active in MCC’s WAC program since 1992, when she began to teach Statistics (MTH 160) as a WR class.  Between then and 1999, she taught no less than 29 of these sections and, in 1998, added a Survey of Mathematics (MTH 150) to the college’s WR course offerings—and she continues to do so, when her schedule permits.

Annette was a key member of the WAC Committee from September 1995 to September 2008.  During those years, she provided Stasia Callan (the WAC program founder and its first coordinator) and all successive coordinators with sound advice on ways to make the program grow in size, through the recruitment of new faculty and students, and intellectually, through a series of annual workshops for faculty and students.  Her longevity on the committee also provided the Program with a strong sense of continuity.  As WAC coordinator since 2001, I can say with certainty that Annette’s presence was indispensable: she filled me in on the program’s history and the committee’s traditions but was not rigid in her approach; on the contrary, she was continually innovative.  She helped create, and with me co-present, a WAC Advisement Workshop for new faculty.  She also embraced the culture of student assessment and volunteered to examine student outcomes in WR courses from her department. Finally, she is an excellent teacher who is thoroughly devoted to teaching mathematics through writing.  In 2002, I had the pleasure of observing one of her MTH 150 sections, where students applied the Pythagorean Theorem to a number of math problems and then explained, through writing, how the theorem worked and why it is useful.  Although the instructions seemed rudimentary, the writing portion proved challenging: most students were used to merely memorizing formulas and working them out through numbers and letters.  Their attempts to explain the process in ordinary discourse at once revealed the limits of their understanding and enabled them to see math from a more broadly critical standpoint.

Please join me and other members of the WAC Committee in celebrating Annette’s accomplishment at the Employee Recognition Ceremony on May 27.

Tony Leuzzi
English/Philosophy
04/30/2009