Goodey-Pellois, Carly-Miles Earn Academic Professional Track Teaching Excellence Awards

Two faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences are among 10 Texas A&M University faculty selected as 2023 recipients of the Provost Academic Professional Track (APT) Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, announced this week by the Texas A&M Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE).

Chemistry professor Joanna Goodey-Pellois and English professor Claire Carly-Miles each received the coveted honor, created in 2019 by the CTE to encourage, recognize and reward faculty recipients for exceptional teaching practices that create meaningful learning experiences for students. The award is intended to illustrate both the impact of an effective teaching approach and the value of student-centered learning.

In addition to retaining the perpetual award title for life, Goodey-Pellois and Carly-Miles each will receive a $5,000 cash stipend generously gifted by the Marie M. and James H. Galloway Foundation.

Goodey-Pellois is an instructional associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, where she also has served as director of the First Year Program (FYP) in Chemistry since 2019. A member of the Texas A&M faculty since 2006, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Houston in 2001 and completed a one-year postdoctoral research assistantship there prior to beginning her independent academic career as a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Barnard College from 2002 to 2004.

At Texas A&M, Goodey-Pellois has taught general chemistry to more than 10,000 freshmen scientists and engineers, designed professional development and training exercises for hundreds of chemistry graduate students and taught a communications seminar for an additional hundreds of senior undergraduate chemistry majors. Her focus on helping students build solid foundations can be seen through her career leadership positions thus far, first as a general chemistry lab coordinator (2007-2008), then as an associate graduate advisor (2010-2018) and currently as FYP director. In the latter role, she oversees the education of thousands of students per semester in first-year general chemistry lectures and laboratories, both by direct instruction and by coordination of the overall FYP curriculum and teaching.

Goodey-Pellois’ previous recognitions include Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Awards for Teaching at both the university (2021) and college levels (2020), a 2019 Texas A&M Honoring Excellence Award and being named a 2019 Texas A&M 21st Century Classroom Building Fellow. In addition to her individual accomplishments, Goodey-Pellois’ work has shined through team efforts across the university benefiting both students and faculty alike. Her passion for designing not only active learning courses but also the spaces in which they are offered led her to take an active role in the design and usage planning for Texas A&M’s Innovative Learning Classroom Building that opened in 2020. As a Faculty Fellow for the facility, she assisted other faculty in creating and implementing learning experiences for these innovative learning spaces. When the fall 2020 semester called upon Goodey-Pellois to totally redesign her General Chemistry for Engineers course for 800 freshmen in a hybrid classroom environment, she responded with an interactive, flipped-format class in which students performed better on assessments than they had in past versions of the course. Most recently in 2021, she and a small group of STEM faculty at Texas A&M launched a university-wide learning community dedicated to implementing inclusive teaching practices in large gateway STEM courses.

“Joanna is imminently deserving of this award,” said Simon W. North, John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry and head of the Department of Chemistry. “She expertly teaches thousands of students, maintaining rigor while exhibiting concern for student well-being. Students recognize her teaching talent and vote with their feet: Her sections of CHEM 107 are the first to fill during preregistration. In addition, she facilitates excellent teaching in others, both graduate student teaching assistants and faculty, across the Texas A&M campus.”

Carly-Miles '08 is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of English, where she is the coordinator of the multi-section writing course, Introduction to Writing about Literature (ENGL 203), and the former coordinator up until this past fall of another, Technical and Professional Writing (ENGL 210). She earned her Ph.D. in English from Texas A&M in 2008 after receiving bachelor’s degrees in both English and history from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 and a master’s in English from Southern Methodist University in 1995. She has served in a variety of teaching, research and editorial capacities at Texas A&M since 1995 and has been teaching full-time in the department since fall 2016. Prior to that, she was on faculty at a variety of institutions, including Baylor University, Montgomery College in Maryland and Washington University in St. Louis.

In addition to completely revising both of the aforementioned core writing courses, Carly-Miles has worked collaboratively since 2019 to create open educational resource (OER) textbooks used in each class — resources that remain available to students even after they graduate. In the process of saving Texas A&M students thousands of dollars per semester, she has created a vibrant community of teacher-scholars (including graduate student instructors) who are committed to collaborative course development and innovative pedagogy. Carly-Miles has presented her research on the pedagogy and creation of OERs as well as contract grading at various national conferences. She also continues to participate in the revision of both textbooks and the creation of other OER offerings, including free or low-cost versions of the department’s most frequently taught literary works and films, made available via a LibGuide, ENGL 203 Readings.

Beyond her work with OERs that was recognized in 2021 with a Team Sustainability Champions Award and an OASES/Texas A&M University Libraries Award, Carly-Miles serves on the Faculty Senate’s Core Curriculum Committee, as a Hullabaloo U instructor, as a faculty advisor to a student organization and on the department’s Diversity Committee, which she now chairs. In an effort to better meet the needs of underrepresented and first-generation students, she organized and contributed to a semester-long series of talks and workshops on writing pedagogy, Teaching Writing Now: Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice in the Writing Classroom, editing and publishing a summary collection of related talks and roundtable presentations in the open access writing studies journal Open Words. She is a member of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, College Composition and Communication, the National Council of Teachers of English and the Modern Languages Association.

“Dr. Carly-Miles is a gifted, caring and innovative instructor who exemplifies best practices in student-centered learning, evidence-based teaching and iterative assessment,” said Maura Ives, professor and head of the Department of English. “She truly loves teaching, and she cares deeply about the success and well-being of our students.

“The students who enroll in Dr. Carly-Miles’ class are lucky to learn from one of the most energetic, accomplished, creative and empathetic instructors in our department. Our university is also lucky to have her on board, because she epitomizes the best of what our APT faculty contribute to Texas A&M University. Through her leadership and expertise, she is making a difference, not only for our students and colleagues at Texas A&M, but for students and instructors across the nation.”