Jessica Teets Wins Gladstone Award for Excellence in Teaching

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Jessica Teets, associate professor of political science, has won Middlebury’s Gladstone Award Honoring Excellence in Teaching.

The Gladstone Award was established in 2012 by Christopher D. Gladstone P’13 and Elise J. Rabekoff P’13 to recognize faculty who have exhibited exceptional teaching and mentoring within and beyond the classroom. The award provides support for faculty to undertake a project that enhances their teaching within the classroom or supports collaborative student/faculty work outside the classroom. Each year, the College selects the candidate whose record and proposal best exemplify the qualities this award is meant to recognize.

Teets joined the Middlebury College faculty in 2009, and has taught courses in comparative politics, Chinese politics and foreign policy, and the political economy of development.

In the summer of 2016, Teets—along with Orion Lewis and Wei Liang—received funding from the Fund for Innovation to take a group of students to China for a summer study course on trade, diplomacy, and development. The course had as one of its goals the close integration of teaching and research, and this model of a research-based pedagogy is also the subject of Teets’s Gladstone proposal. She will collaborate with the “Two Countries–One Bird” initiative to bring students to the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2018 to conduct collaborative fieldwork in a project that represents the next step in the development of a model for research-based, engaged learning.