Red Rocks Community College faculty member Liz Kleinfeld, who has helped hundreds of students hone their writing skills in her 12 years at the college, has been named Faculty of the Year for 2007.
The annual award provides winners a $2,000 stipend for professional development. Faculty members are nominated for the award by their peers and a faculty committee selects the winner.
Kleinfeld said she was rooting for the faculty member she had nominated and was caught off guard when a group of faculty burst into her classroom with a bouquet of flowers and the news that she was the winner.
"I've had a lot of other jobs - restaurant, secretarial - but I never looked forward to going to work," Kleinfeld said. "With this job, I look forward to it every day. Right now I have a lot of papers to grade, and I'm looking forward to it because my students work really hard and I want to see what they've done. I love what I do."
Her students return the compliment. "They (her students) rave about her to other teachers and are frequently lined up outside her door seeking advice and help semesters later," read the letter nominating her for the award.
Kleinfeld teaches composition, lots of it - creative writing, poetry, technical writing. She's been at it at Red Rocks since she joined the faculty as an adjunct faculty member. She is now an associate professor of English at Red Rocks.
She also is interested in computer applications to writing and may spend her stipend on a conference on "Computers and Writing" offered in Georgia.
"Dr. Kleinfeld was instrumental in the design and adoption of Writing @ RRCC, a writing handbook for Red Rocks students and faculty alike, the strongest effort to date to promote writing across the curriculum," wrote her nominator. "Liz is also at the forefront in her own classroom, adopting the latest technology and making her classes as relevant and fun as possible. Students in her classes write and record audio essays, write research based poems, and make use of blogging."
She earned a bachelor's degree in history at Bradley University in Peoria, IL, but graduated with more credits in English than history because she enjoyed the classes so much. Her master's from Illinois State University is in English and her doctorate is in English studies with an emphasis in composition.
The Faculty of the Year award is not her first teaching award. Kleinfeld has won the eLearning Educator of the Year from the Telecoop Distance Learning Consortium, Endowed Teaching Chair from the Cherry Hills Country Club Foundation, an Educational Assessment and Research Grant for research into the effectiveness of the RRCC Online Writing Center and an Illinois State University Fellowship.