This spring, the Dean of Faculty’s Office awarded Senior Lecturer Doug Moody the Dean of the Faculty Teaching Award for Visiting and Adjunct Faculty.
Moody teaches Writing 2-3 for the Writing and Rhetoric Program; he also teaches courses in Spanish, LALACS, and Women’s Studies. All of Moody’s courses offer students opportunities to work collaboratively and creatively, often through project-based learning activities, such as the production of digital video projects and class performances. Moody believes that this spirit of creativity and collaborative inquiry provides students the opportunity to envision and to enact positive social change.
Underscoring his commitment to social change is Moody’s ongoing work with the Tucker Foundation. In December, 2005, Moody took part in the Foundation’s Cross-Cultural Education Service Program in Nicaragua. He had such a good experience there that he returned in 2006. In the summer of 2007, through the generous support of the Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Tucker Foundation, and other funding sources at Dartmouth, Moody and others were able to bring a group of Nicaraguans to Dartmouth College in a true spirit of reciprocity and cross-cultural exchange.
Moody notes that the learning that occurs on trips such as the CCESP in Nicaragua is unparalleled. He goes on to say that “those of us who are involved in social service learning projects and activism in our communities — both local and global — understand the profound value these kinds of experiences have for our students and for ourselves. We need to find ways in which the theories we teach can be put into praxis, so that we may model for our students the essential importance of giving back something to our communities from our positions of relative privilege in the academy.”
Building on his ethos of collaboration, Moody has been exploring the ways in which internet-mediated communication tools can allow students and teachers to meet and share perspectives, even if the participants are not on the same campus or even on the same continent. In 2005, Moody received a Fulbright Scholar Exchange Grant for his project, “Creating Networks of Intercultural Understanding: Assessing Web-based Learning Environments.” In this project, Moody spent most of an academic year initiating and directing telecollaborative exchanges between Dartmouth College and two universities in Puebla, Mexico. Moody comments that, “At times we may be removed from one another in physical space, yet the various internet-based modes of communication that currently exist, and which are becoming more and more accessible at our partner institutions around the world, are becoming a more ubiquitous presence in our intellectual and social lives.” He continues to develop online learning communities that encourage collective learning experiences.
Moody is the third among the IWR core faculty to receive a distinguished teaching award. The Writing and Rhetoric Program is fortunate to have a core of committed and talented teachers on its staff. Moody acknowledges his debt to our faculty, saying, “My colleagues in the departments and programs I work in are very generous with their time and in sharing their ideas about ways to inspire and challenge students in the classroom and beyond the classroom. The many conversations that I have had with my colleagues — in the corridors of the departments and programs where I teach, in workshops at DCAL, and in the virtual and social spaces we inhabit — all of these dialogues have contributed to my formation as a teacher, and I value very highly the camaraderie and pedagogical expertise of my many talented friends and colleagues in the Dartmouth community. They have all helped me to grow as a teacher and as a person.”
