A generous donation by Leah Savion, FACET Class of 1993, will support a new fellowship to support NTT FACET members’ research on teaching and learning. Please join me in thanking Leah, a/k/a Your Majesty.
Leah has a well-known commitment to teaching excellence, benefitting the FACET community through her distinguished engagement and service, her undergraduate students through her teaching excellence, and graduate students preparing for teaching in their careers through her shared expertise and wisdom. It is due to her longstanding interest in supporting teaching excellence through mentorship and leadership that she decided to found the Leah Savion Fellowship.
As Leah and I discussed her donation, I had the pleasure of learning about her career. I knew of her interest in philosophy, logic, cognitive biases, and the concept of self-deception. I also knew she had a longstanding commitment to all things FACET and faculty development, leading her first retreat dance session of many at our 1994 retreat, participating in retreat planning and selection com. multiple times, and eventually receiving the PA Mack Award in 2010. I knew of her love of dance but didn’t know she also sings as part of a trio.
Here are some other details that our community will enjoy. Leah earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the City University of New York in New York City. She served as faculty member in two departments at IU Bloomington, the Department of Philosophy for 28 years until January 2018, and then the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Medicine in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of nine textbooks in her discipline and about pedagogy. She has offered courses in the Hutton Honors College, the Liberal Arts Management Program, intensive freshman seminars, Human Biology, the Graduate School, and directed graduate student pedagogical training for a number of years. She has an international reputation in the intersection of cognitive science and pedagogy. I suggest watching her amusing 2016 TEDx talk on self-deception. Leah’s own curiosity and research record is a model for NTT faculty and drives her belief that non-tenure track faculty have the capacity, curiosity, and commitment to improve their teaching through evidence-based research on teaching and learning.
The Leah Savion Fellowship will be awarded annually to an active FACET member in the NTT ranks. The FACET office will release application details in the fall and the first fellow will be announced at the 2024 retreat to be held at Fourwinds on Lake Monroe, May 15-17, 2024.
For the NTT faculty who may be interested in this opportunity, Leah has asked that research on teaching and learning be thought of broadly. It could be experimental, observational, or academic, for dissemination in the scholarship on teaching and learning ("SoTL"), discipline-based pedagogical research, textbook, or other book on evidence-based teaching practices. The fellowship will provide financial support (approximately 4.5K) for research, teaching materials, conference attendance, and other professional development activities.