Emily Scida Named Daniels Family NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor

April 28, 2011 — Emily E. Scida, associate professor of Spanish in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences, has been awarded the Daniels Family National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a three-year appointment. She was honored at the 2011 Teaching Awards Banquet Wednesday.

Scida, who has long been interested in teacher development and assessment, will work with the Teaching Resource Center, exploring ways to improve undergraduate foreign-language teaching and to help graduate teaching assistants – and their faculty supervisors – become better facilitators of learning.

"We are constantly engaged in a learning process most likely sparked by a genuine curiosity, a need, an uncertainty, perhaps a puzzlement ... a desire for improvement – and questions that are meaningful to our lives," she wrote in a teaching statement.

Her project will culminate in a teaching-resource website.

Deborah Parker, who chairs the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, foresees that the website will "emphasize teacher development over training and encourage instructors to be reflective, incorporate innovative technology and work collaboratively with students to make them agents in their own learning."

Scida is director of the Spanish and Italian language programs and director of the Summer Language Institute for Spanish and Italian. Her areas of research include technology integration, applied linguistics, comparative Romance linguistics and historical syntax.

— By Anne Bromley

Media Contact

Anne E. Bromley

Office of University Communications