Glynda Hull Wins Distinguished Teaching Award

 

Professor of Education Glynda Hull was one of three faculty members campuswide to win UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award for the 2002–03 academic year.

Hull, whose areas of research are writing in and out of schools, and multimedia technology and new literacies, teaches in the Language and Literacy, Society and Culture area of study.

One of Hull’s latest projects is DUSTY—Digital Urban Storytelling for Youth—centered in the high poverty area of West Oakland. The initiative brings together Graduate School of Education students, Cal undergrads, and local kids and seniors to spark literacy by using the latest in computer technology. In DUSTY, elementary and middle school students discover how to tell their own stories and help the elderly write about their lives. The project involves Berkeley students tutoring and mentoring youth to help them learn multimedia technology to tell about their lives, and in the process, the Berkeley students develop their own skills.

Here’s how Hull describes her teaching strategy for the UC Berkeley arm of this many-handed project:

“I encourage my students to juxtapose their own biographies to the matter of the course, becoming alert to how their experiences diverge from and overlap the lives of those they intend to teach and study. It’s not as important, I have found, to announce with finality how one should think, as it is to give students the floor to think and the principles for judging the quality of ideas. I take students’ writing seriously and expect the same from them, responding in detail to their prose. I insist that students choose their projects well, never being satisfied with work that fails to capture their imaginations and energy or to demand their whole attention and all of their ability. And I remain respectful of how gradual a thing learning typically is, how developmental, and I stay patient.”

photos this page by Peg Skorpinski

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