Fr. David Collins, S.J., professor Anthony DelDonna and professor Cristina Sanz received the 2014 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and were recognized Jan. 27 at the 2014-15 Convocation of the College Faculty.

The College Dean’s Award is designed to honor excellence in the teaching of undergraduate students and was presented to its first recipients in 1996. The awards have remained competitive, with about 10 nominees submitted by departments each year, according to Dean of Georgetown College Chester Gillis.

“All of the nominees were outstanding and an inspiration,” Gillis wrote in an email.
In the selection process, dossiers were compiled of each nominated professor’s past teaching evaluations, a statement outlining his or her teaching philosophy and accounts from past and present students about their experiences in each professor’s classes.

The final dossiers were then submitted to a selection committee composed of three previous awardees. This year’s committee included professor Angel de Dios, professor Joseph Murphy and professor Nicoletta Pireddu.

DelDonna, a professor in the department of performing arts, expressed how it felt to receive the award.

“It means a great deal,” DelDonna said. “I have very talented, dedicated and deserving colleagues, and so for them to put forward my name and then to actually be recognized by the award was very humbling.”

DelDonna began teaching at Georgetown in 2003 and specializes in 18th-century Neapolitan music and culture. His previous research on opera, performance practice, ballet and archival studies has been published in a range of scholarly volumes. At Georgetown, DelDonna teaches courses on topics such as the history of opera and Baroque-era music.

Of the 57 total recipients in the award’s history, DelDonna is the fifth performing arts faculty member to be recognized, and this is the first nomination he has received. It is common for professors to be nominated several times before they receive the award. Last year, Maya Roth, an professor and chair of the department of performing arts, won the Dean’s Award.

DelDonna emphasized the creation of dialogue between professor and students as an integral component of his teaching style.

“I don’t think of it as teaching; I think of it as sharing,” DelDonna said. “It’s about seeing my students as individuals. I’m not looking at it from the perspective of a grade necessarily, or whether you’re right or wrong, but what you’re bringing to the discussion. For me, that’s where I place the premium — in the act of learning itself and sharing.”

Collins joined Georgetown’s department of history in 2004 after 20 years of Jesuit training and doctoral studies. He has published extensively on the cultural history of the late Middle Ages with focus on the cult of the saints, Renaissance humanism and learned magic. Collins teaches courses including “Saints and Society” and “Europe from the Millennium to the Black Death.”

Collins highlighted teaching as a way to bridge his passion for his subject and his students.

“Teaching is all about human engagement,” Collins said. “The students here are so bright, and so curious, that its fun to be able to brainstorm with them. Even if it’s brainstorming with them over a document I’ve read a hundred times before, the perspectives they come to it with, the questions they pose, their willingness to disagree — it’s all engaging, thrilling and beneficial.”

When asked about his teaching style, Collins explained the lessons he learned from teaching at high school as a component of his Jesuit training.

“It was ingrained in me, from the very beginning, how to read certain signs,” Collins said. “The ability to read the effectiveness of how you’re engaging students with the material, how you’re communicating — that’s something that a college professor has to do.”

Collins also emphasized the atmosphere created by his fellow Jesuits and his colleagues in the history department.

“We’re constantly sharing ideas,” Collins said. “I’ve very much benefitted from the two groups of people around me who have created a culture of undergraduate teaching as very important.”

Sanz has been teaching for over 20 years, and is a professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her areas of focus are second-language acquisition, bilingualism and Spanish linguistics, and her volume “Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition” received the 2006 MLA’s Mildenberger Prize for an Outstanding Research Publication. Sanz teaches intensive-track Spanish courses and classes on bilingualism.

Both Collins and Sanz have been nominated for the Dean’s Award before.
Sanz expressed her devotion to teaching and what has driven this dedication for so long.

“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Sanz said. “I like that I can make a difference; that I can have a student in front of me who is an ‘empty bag’ at the beginning of the semester, a ‘bag’ that leaves my classroom at the end of the course with knowledge that it didn’t contain before.”
Sanz explained the holistic approach she takes to education and compared it to her previous experiences in Spain.

“In Spain, like in many parts of the world, teaching is very teacher-directed,” Sanz said. “Knowledge comes from the teacher and students do not contribute; I don’t believe that’s the best way to teach. I think that to learn you have to be involved — learning is active, and learning happens through the exchange of ideas.”