1996 Honors and Awards
Awards Ceremony and Luncheon
April 26, 1996
Keoni Auditorium, Imin Conference Center, Jefferson
Hall
Board of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Teaching
Board of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research
Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching
Robert W. Clopton Award for Outstanding Service to the Community
Willard Wilson Distinguished Service Award
Profiles
Regents' Medal for Excellence in Teaching
Linda Boynton Arthur is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Resources, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Arthur's philosophy of classroom instruction is simple: she wants to stimulate her students' curiosity. She wants her students to always wonder as to the WHY of human social behavior, especially as it pertains to textiles and clothing. Arthur finds active learning methodology an effective way to stimulate curiosity about the connection between culture and clothing. As Curator of the Historic Costume Collections, her interest in active learning involves the development of interactive multimedia activities for costume courses.
Colette Browne is an associate professor in the School of Social Work, College of Health Sciences and Social Welfare. Browne believes that teaching social work is a challenging task, for we must not only teach knowledge and skills but also address the values of society and the values of our students through thoughts, experiences and research. She encourages students to reflect on their values and through critical thinking to examine their future role as social workers. Browne's current work is organized around the development of strategies and technologies to ensure that older adults, specifically older women and ethnic-minority elders, have improved quality of life, and the advancement of the gerontology curricula to respond to the needs of social work students planning to serve these populations.
Richard Kasuya is an assistant professor of Medicine in the John A. Burns School of Medicine, College of Health Sciences and Social Welfare. Educating the physicians of the 21st Century is an exciting, invigorating challenge. Kasuya strives to give students of medicine the best chance to succeed in a rigorous, unforgiving discipline where one must set high standards, have consistently high expectations, and provide the guidance, support and nurturing required to help achieve these goals. Kasuya believes that it is imperative that he remain first and foremost a physician so that he can best understand his task as a teacher of physicians-in-training. He serves as a Problem Based Learning tutor for first year medical students and has led interdisciplinary efforts in developing new programs for senior medical students interested in careers in Primary Care.
Sterling Keeley is a professor and chairperson of the Department of Botany, College of Natural Sciences. Keeley sees botany as a particularly important point of intersection between interests of the community and the university, and as fundamental to the basic core curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences. She sees her role as a teacher as having three mutually supportive and interactive facets: the classroom lecturer, the tutor and the role model. Keeley's role as a tutor is probably her favorite. Finding herself a role model as a successful woman scientist was one of those unexpected and maturing experiences of life. Guided by Christa MacAuliffe ("I touch the future, I teach"), Keeley has a renewed sense of purpose and inspiration for each new class, new project and new generation of students.
Leighton Liu is an associate professor in the School of Architecture. Liu finds the Bengali concept of the teacher as "one with clever means" more appropriate than the image of a teacher as a dispenser of knowledge. This suggests that teaching is something of an art or craft. He believes that being an educated person has to do largely with being able to make connections--connections between assignments, courses, subject areas, ideas, time periods, places, peoples and cultures. Liu tends to look at everything he does through the eyes of a designer. He believes the teacher's role is to discover and design the "clever means" needed to teach students to become creative individuals.
Kathryn Takara is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, College of Social Sciences. Takara is recognized as a teacher, scholar, mentor, artist and community activist. She encourages her students to see the urgency of communication skills, contacts with minorities, tolerance, research, standing up for the principles of freedom and equality, sharing skills and resources, and understanding the "other," all of which are so necessary to our survival on the planet. Takara brings an uncommon combination of passion and professionalism to her work. She serves as a valuable African American role model and resource to the community.
Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research
Bruce Tabashnik, a researcher in the Department of Entomology, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, is the recipient of the Senior Research Award. Tabashnik's major area of research is an integrated approach to understanding and managing insecticide resistance, ranging from laboratory-based studies of genetics, to simulations of the evolutionary process occurring in the field, to practical recommendations for resistance management. He has developed an international recognition for his research on pesticide resistance to insecticidal proteins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis.
David Bercovici, an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, is the recipient of the Research Award at the Associate level. Bercovici's research covers the broad area of geodynamics, but his most significant contributions concern the physics of thermal convection in the earth's mantle. He brings an entirely new physics and application to bear on the study of the ocean ridges and their tectonics. Bercovici is the recent winner of the prestigious American Geophysical Union James B. Macelwane Award.
Kathryn Klingebiel, an assistant professor in the Department of European Languages and Literature, College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, is the recipient of the Research Award at the Junior Level. Kathryn is a linguist and a medievalist with a strong background in romance philology. Her prolific research and publications on word formation and etymology, particularly in Occitan (spoken only in southern France and in parts of Spain and Italy) and Welsh studies, have earned her a reputation as a scholar of international repute.
Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching
Jeffrey Ady is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, College of Social Sciences. Ady's passion in teaching organizational communication is to prepare students to achieve certain qualities--readiness to keep on learning, the ability to make a genuine difference in life during and after college, and the refusal to settle for anything less than total excellence in their lives. If he can give his students a solid and practically useful theoretical grounding, field experience , and mind-set that continually strives for personal and organizational excellence, he feel he's done his job.
Margaret Maaka is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education. After twenty-four years of teaching experiences spanning preschool to higher education, Maaka feels that her philosophy of teaching is still evolving. Her interests lie in the interrelated areas of literacy education, curriculum studies, multicultural education, and educational psychology. Her classroom practices reflect a determination to move away from restrictive models of education, which view teachers as "controllers of knowledge" and learners as "passive receptors of knowledge," to new models that view teachers as "facilitators of learning" and learners as "active constructors of meaning."
Ruth Mabanglo is an associate professor in the Department of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature. Mabanglo is an award-winning writer and poet in Pilipino (Tagalog). She believes that writing nurtures her and her career. Her classroom teaching approach grew from a belief that literature should beget literature. While studying writing strategies, she has developed keen insights about the Filipino American students in Hawai'i and their attempts to bridge the gap between two worlds. Mabanglo feels especially rewarded when students take a leadership role in making the community aware of Philippine values and culture--a step toward tolerance and understanding.
Gay Garland Reed is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education. Reed believes that learning moves from awareness of ideas, issues and theories in education toward deeper knowledge which permits student understanding and articulation of positions on these issues and the linking of theory with practice. It comes from the integrity of the teacher, from his or her relation to subject and students. The process of moving students from "awareness of" issues, ideas and theories to "knowledge about" requires reading, explication, discussion and skills. It is Reed's hope to help students to think about things they have never thought about before or challenge their assumptions in such a way that they are compelled to rethink issues in new ways.
Kenneth Rehg is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature. Rehg has a deceptively simple philosophy at the core of his teaching: know what to teach, know how to teach it and know when it has been successfully taught. He is fond of a Zen proverb that states: "to know, but not to do, is not yet to know." To understand the difficult concepts of linguistics, students must be adept problem solvers. Rehg attempts to create a proper mental set in his students by establishing both a set of attitudes and a set of expectations. His strength as an educator is derived from his attempts to master the basics. He continues to strive for such mastery.
Lee Siegel is a professor in the Department of Religion, College of Arts and Humanities. Siegel has a love of learning and a delight in teaching that is infectious. He is a prolific researcher and writer; yet he teaches his classes with enthusiasm and the understanding that teaching is his primary and foremost responsibility at this university. He is a good example of how one can excel in both areas, and demonstrates that neither teaching nor research need to be sacrificed for the other. Siegel's success as a teacher comes from his ability to engage his students' intellect and capture their imagination. His classes are exciting and proves that there is joy in learning. Over 10,000 students have taken his Introduction to World Religions course.
Robert W. Clopton Award for Outstanding Service to the Community
Richard Radtke is a researcher in the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. A disability has not prevented Radtke from carrying out his duties as a researcher, interacting with his graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and writing and receiving research grants from such agencies as the National Science Foundation. Radtke contributes an extraordinary amount of time to a large and diverse number of public service projects, including the Board of Directors of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Hawai'i, The Hawai'i Centers for Independent Living, and the Aloha Special Technology Access Center. He is keenly interested in computer accessibility, independent living and disability advocacy. Radtke believes that computer accessibility can change people's perceptions of themselves and their world. Through computer demonstrations and presentations to community groups, he has demonstrated that there is an unlimited potential to human life.
Willard Wilson Distinguished Service Award
Ann Ito is the Director of the KOKUA Program in the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Office, Office of Student Affairs. Ito has built the KOKUA Program from a student volunteer activity to a solid, vital, crucial part of the Manoa campus. KOKUA serves disabled students based on a total respect for the individual. Ito works tirelessly for and with her students so that they can achieve academic excellence and feel welcomed on campus. She is respected widely throughout the system and is frequently called upon for many kinds of counsel. While Ito has personally touched the lives of hundreds of individual students and their families, she has also contributed significantly to public policy discussions and implementation of civil rights laws.
Doris Victor is one of the unsung heroes of UH Manoa--a department secretary in the Department of Plant Molecular Physiology, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Victor has been described as a "gold mine of knowledge" on nearly every aspect of university and State administrative procedures. Always willing to help, she is recognized for her competence, efficiency, dedication and leadership. Victor has worked to improve the effectiveness of all of the college's secretaries. She was nominated for the 1993 Governor's Award for Distinguished State Service. Victor is an outstanding role model for young people beginning their careers in the State Civil Service System.
