September | 2021 | PUGET SOUND PHILOSOPHY

The Puget Sound President’s Excellence in Teaching Award was established by former trustee Hal Eastman ’60 and his wife, Jacque ’61, to recognize faculty members who demonstrate exceptional teaching skills, independent of accomplishments in scholarship, research, or publication. Recipients are selected for their genuine passion for teaching, an ability to inspire students to learn, a capacity to set high expectations and challenge students to meet them, a respect for students as individuals, an enduring intellectual curiosity, and the capacity for growth, change, and vitality in the classroom and beyond.

Professor Protasi next to President Crawford when receiving the award

Sara Protasi, Associate Professor of Philosophy, is the 2021 recipient of the award. Here is the announcement of the award:

Sara Protasi practices a student-centered approach to pedagogy based on the belief that students learn better when they are treated justly and compassionately. With research in moral psychology and ethics broadly construed, she is particularly interested in the emotions, their anatomy, and the role they play in ethics.

Cultivating a classroom environment in which students feel safe—even as they experience productive discomfort while wrestling with difficult concepts—Protasi gives students the space to thrive, making their classes a model for the “personal connections students establish and the intellectual rigor and ability to open students’ minds,” according to one faculty colleague. One student notes that in Protasi’s class, she was “really challenged … to think on my own and to find the why behind my thoughts.” Another comments that “This is one of the few classes that genuinely changed the way I see the world.”
https://www.pugetsound.edu/presidents-excellence-teaching-award

Congratulations Prof. Protasi!