By TINA IYER
Features Editor
 

According to Wenzel, the Carnegie Foundation "tries to encourage and recognize good or excellent teaching on the part of the faculty." Wenzel believes that the foundation's intention is to encourage faculty members to think about how they educate, and to acknowledge publicly effective teaching.

The foundation asks individual colleges to nominate faculty during the spring. The awards are officially announced in October.

"I don't get anything [for the award]," remarked Wenzel, smiling. "But I do get recognition." This recognition is not based on merely a year's worth of work, although the award is for "Professor of the Year." Rather, "it is reflective of the work a person has done in general," he said.

What makes Wenzel's teaching unique and effective? In response to this question, Wenzel noted that, "I heavily involve students in my research efforts." Since 1981, when Wenzel began teaching at Bates, all of his academic papers have been co-authored by and done in collaboration with his students.

Furthermore, Wenzel has been employing a project-based teaching strategy since 1990. In his field of chemical analysis, the traditional method of teaching is to give students a chemical sample to analyze in the laboratory. "What I've done instead," he said, "is to have the students participate in quite ambitious semester long projects."

For example, students have chosen to pursue a project in which they use samples of air from automobile exhaust - which is not an easy task, according to Wenzel.

The importance of this teaching method is that it stresses "the complete aspect of what it takes to do chemical analysis," he said.

Also, Wenzel no longer relies on lectures to teach his students. Instead, students work in small groups throughout the semester, both in and out of class. Wenzel sees himself in the position of a facilitator in class; he listens to the interaction and dialogue of the groups and comments when necessary.

"The students in the class are both students and teachers," said Wenzel, who implemented this style of teaching because "I had grown frustrated with the methods that I had been using."

Wenzel, who is on leave this semester, usually teaches two upperlevel chemistry courses, Separation Science (to be offered this winter term), and Analytical Spectroscopy and Electrochemistry. In these courses, which tend to have a fewer number of students, project-based teaching has been relative easy to set in motion.

"I think what I'm doing with my upper-level courses really does work better. What I see as my real upcoming challenge is to try to use these methods in teaching general chemistry," said Wenzel. Wenzel acknowledges the importance of making upper-level chemistry courses more akin to "how scientists do science," but also realizes that , "it is essential to do the same in the introductory level classes."

Project-based teaching is more difficult to incorporate in introductory classes because of their larger size.

For the fall of 1998, Wenzel and Rachel Austin, assistant professor of chemistry, are creating a new section of the introductory chemistry course. The course will be contextualized so that each aspect of chemistry which is discussed will be related to issues of the environment.