Jonathan Riddle Receives the Brett J. Love Award for Teaching Excellence
Jonathan Riddle, a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Great Books at Seaver College, recently received the Brett J. Love Award for Teaching Excellence – an honor that highlights a non-tenured professor within the Humanities and Teacher’s Education Division for his or her commitment to their students.
“I'm so encouraged to receive the Brett J. Love Award for Teaching Excellence,” says
Riddle, “because it provides a generous recognition of something that sometimes gets
overshadowed by the more prestigious aspects of academia: the foundational importance
of teaching students to the very best of our ability.”
With a Ph.D in History from the University of Notre Dame, Riddle is a distinguished historical scholar focussing specifically on religion, health and medicine, as well as American History. At Seaver College, he teaches courses centered around the focal points of his research, instructing students in the History of the American Peoples and the Great Books Colloquium.
“My goal in the classroom is to welcome all students to an active engagement with history that defies the discipline's reputation for simply memorizing names and dates,” explains Riddle. “ Instead, I try to show students how an honest, unflinching encounter with the diversity of past experiences can be truly transformative. This encounter enables us to understand our world more deeply, to think more critically about ourselves, and to imagine our futures with greater creativity and compassion. In this way, history plays an integral role in the pursuit of wisdom and the life of intellectual integrity.”
The Brett J. Love Award for Teaching Excellence was established in 2003 to honor a late, non-tenured faculty member of Seaver College. Brett Love was a Professor of English who passed away on April 12, 2003. With this honor, Riddle becomes the 19th recipient of the award.
To learn more about the Humanities and Teacher’s Education Division at Seaver College, visit their website.