Martin Lang, Communication Studies Department
I am honored to present this year’s recipient of the Edgar M. Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching – the highest honor awarded to a Gustavus faculty member. The winner is selected from student, faculty, and staff nominations recognizing this person’s teaching excellence and their commitment to innovative and effective teaching strategies.
This year, we recognize a professor whose students self-report “[showing] up prepared, excited, and motivated to learn something new because [they knew] it would be presented in a way that was compelling.” One key ingredient to this colleague’s excellence is their engagement in lifelong learning – a trait that might have been cultivated during their time as a Gustie. Then again, it might stem from their experiences navigating the complexity of higher education as a first generation college student. But no matter the cause, one thing is certain: my colleagues and I have seen just how “serious [they are] about improving teaching ALL the time”. They will seek out multiple perspectives on a pedagogical approach and carefully deliberate its impact on students before selecting and deploying it in their own classroom.
A student nominator highlighted how our colleague also works alongside students to “create examples together, practice examples, and apply examples to [their] lives”. They ask students to engage class content through collaboration with communities beyond Gustavus. By being a champion for Community Engaged Learning, their classes continue impacting students years later because they “challenge [students] to live the material that [they are learning].”
Even in their own scholarly work, it is not enough to study the interaction between media, power dynamics, and social constructions of identity. They witness these relationships firsthand by generating their own media to engage discourse in the community. The documentaries Farming Forward and (Mid)West of Somalia, made in collaboration with students, are just one example of how he demonstrates how to be “an innovative, global citizen who … [is a] leader and an advocate in [his] interactions with others, in [his] professional lives, and in [his] communities”.
Dr. Martin Lang has been teaching at Gustavus since 2005. After graduating from Gustavus in 1995 with a double major in English and Speech Communication, he went on to receive a Masters in Rhetorical Studies and a PhD in Media Studies, Rhetorical Criticism from the University of Minnesota. Martin’s Communication Studies courses often contribute to Film and Media Studies and to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Undoubtedly, many students would agree with the nominator who wrote that their “Gustavus career would not be nearly as fulfilling without the classes that [they] have taken with Martin”.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Martin Lang, winner of the 2023 Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Presented by Lauren Hecht
Professor of Psychological Science
2022 Recipient of the Edgar M. Carlson Award