Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award 2023-24

The Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award celebrates the Humanities Division faculty’s commitment to excellence in teaching and its transformative impact for undergraduate students. The award is named in honor of Professor Emeritus John Dizikes, a member of the founding faculty whose powerful ability to inspire and engage generations of students exemplifies our aspirations as teachers.

Since 2002, the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award has celebrated the work of outstanding teachers and their students. The award honors the work of faculty and supports students who aspire to learning and critical thinking. Faculty recipients of the award receive a grant and designate students from a Humanities Division program to receive scholarships in their name that recognize academic accomplishment.

Ryan Bennett

Associate Professor, Linguistics Department

When students first encounter linguistics, they are sometimes surprised at how analytical our field can be. Human languages are deceptively complicated, and so learning to do linguistics necessarily involves the development of careful, methodical reasoning skills.

I try to help students develop effective 'habits of thought' for dealing with thorny problems and puzzles --- not just in linguistics, but in other arenas too. With practice, students learn how to break intricate, sometimes daunting patterns into smaller, more intelligible parts. And bit by bit, students become experts at communicating how those simple pieces fit together to produce a surprisingly complex whole. My hope is that these skills will serve our students well wherever they go.

Linguistics is a relatively young science, which leaves a lot of space for creativity. Some of my favorite moments in teaching are when a student proposes an unexpected, left-field analysis of some set of linguistic data which actually *works*, despite its novelty. But helping students reach that point requires fostering a sense of courage and self-confidence which they may not have had before. One of the greatest rewards as a teacher is watching these traits grow in our students.

The richness and complexity of human language is unparalleled in any other species --- it is part of what makes us who we are. As often as I can, I try to remind students that learning linguistics is, fundamentally, to learn about themselves.

The 2023-2024 Ryan Bennett Scholarship Recipients