Carnegie Foundation names Williams Georgia Professor of the Year

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education have named North Georgia College & State University's Linda Williams the 2007 Georgia Professor of the Year. Williams was selected from more than 300 top professors in the United States.

Williams, who has been teaching for 21 years, wrote in a personal statement to the Carnegie Foundation that she has “dreamed about being a teacher since my pre-school days.” She pursued that life-long ambition and started teaching at Southwest DeKalb High School in 1972 after graduating from West Georgia. Graduate school took her to Oklahoma, where she earned a Master of Arts in English at the University of Central Oklahoma in 1986 and a Doctorate of Philosophy in higher education administration at the University of Oklahoma in 1990. She returned home to Georgia and started teaching English at NGCSU in 1997.

“Along the way, I got hooked on the rewards that teaching composition provides, the rewards that come from seeing the faces of students who finally understand that they can be writers - good writers - despite the discouraging feedback they've received in the past, despite their lack of success in other English classes,” Williams said.

The Professor of the Year Award is based on a professor's dedication to undergraduate teaching and determined by excellence in the following four areas: impact on and involvement with undergraduate students; scholarly approach to teaching and learning; contributions to undergraduate education in the institution, community and profession; and support from colleagues and current and former undergraduate students.

“While I have taught advanced classes filled with English majors whom I've enabled to grow as writers, I'm convinced that my commitment, talents, and energies have counted the most when devoted to the teaching of first-year composition,” Williams said.

A sample of Williams' published work in peer-reviewed journals includes “Communication across the Campus: Expanding Our Mission To Practice What We Profess” in “The Journal of Business Communication” and “Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: A Memoir in Three Acts” in “The English Record.”

Williams coordinates North Georgia's learning communities - devised in 2006 to support students' holistic approach to learning - and she is the recipient of the Dorothy Golden Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Composition.

This year, there are Professor of the Year award winners in 40 states and the District of Columbia. CASE assembled two preliminary panels of judges to select finalists. The Carnegie Foundation then convened the third and final panel, which selected four national winners. CASE and Carnegie select state winners from top entries resulting from the judging process. Williams was selected from faculty members nominated by colleges and universities throughout the country.