UW News

June 27, 2002

Lifelong learning awards presented

The second annual faculty awards for Distinguished Contributions to Lifelong Learning were presented yesterday by UW Educational Outreach.

The awards honor faculty who taught or designed courses, seminars or workshops aimed at working adults and other nontraditional students, and who received excellent teaching evaluations for that work. A committee of UW faculty and UW continuing education administrators chose the winners. Each winner received a plaque and a $1,000 award.

This year’s winners are:

Ruth F. Craven

Craven, professor and associate dean of educational outreach & community relations, School of Nursing, has been at the UW for 34 years, both as an administrator and as a teacher of gerontological nursing. She has been involved in the planning of hundreds of educational programs specifically tailored for professional development, including a post-master Nurse Practitioner Program and the Perioperative Nursing Certificate Program. She has also worked with the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education and the American Nurses Credentialing Center. She has been involved in an effort to promote partnerships in nursing education between the three UW campuses, a project funded by President Richard L. McCormick’s Tools For Transformation initiative. Craven holds a doctorate in education from Seattle University and a Master of Nursing degree from the UW.

Gerry Philipsen

Philipsen, professor and chair, Speech Communication, teaches and researches topics in ethnography of communication, small group discussion and decision-making, and orality. He has been involved in distance learning since 1996, developing two courses in speech communication. More recently, he was one of three UW faculty who participated in a pilot program to test the first UW undergraduate distance learning courses to be offered in the regular schedule. As chair of the Faculty Senate in 1999–2000, Philipsen also worked to change how the UW records distance-learning classes in student transcripts. Philipsen holds a doctorate from Northwestern University.

Richard Strickland

Strickland, lecturer and research scientist, School of Oceanography, has taught continuing education classes through UW Educational Outreach for the past nine years. He has stewarded the distance-learning course Oceanography 101, updating the class with the latest field knowledge and the newest technologies and resources available in online learning. His teaching style and mastery of the distance-learning format have earned him high marks from his students. Strickland is also a free-lance science writer and served as a staff science writer for the UW School of Oceanography. He is a doctoral candidate at the UW School of Oceanography, where he also earned his Master’s in Biological Oceanography.