UW Rewards the Wisconsin Idea: Professor Emily Auerbach Wins Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award

Today my Continuing Studies colleague Professor Emily Auerbach receives the 2010 Van Hise Outreach Teaching Award from the UW-Madison.  I am honored to have been asked to introduce her at the awards ceremony. Having helped draft her nomination makes it easy to write the introduction, but Doug Moe helped me out this morning with his Wisconsin State Journal column:

Auerbach has taught in classrooms, nursing homes, libraries, prisons, on radio and through the mail. She's had a 106-year-old student. "I learned to make the hand-outs large print," she said.

Auerbach taught Edith Wharton to a woman whose mother had actually seen Wharton in the flesh. Her best discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, Auerbach said, came at the Oak Hill Correctional Institution.

"The prisoners saw things in the poems I hadn't seen before."

Auerbach views that Dickinson experience as epitomizing the Wisconsin Idea. It's not just about professors imparting their wisdom around the state - it's a give and take in which the professor might learn something too.

Professor Auerbach's work has been key to the success of the UW's Odyssey Project, described broadly as a "free humanities course for adults at the poverty level." The Odyssey Project is without doubt the most successful program of its type in the country.  Based on the University of Chicago’s Clemente Program, which was originally organized to introduce the “great books” of Western culture to minority adults living in poverty, the Odyssey Project goes further.  Emily Auerbach uses written materials from a far broader base, and creates a living bridge to higher education by instilling in Odyssey participants the all-important tools of critical reading and writing. So far, it's working.

Congratulations, Emily.

- Barry Orton