The Academic Affairs Division is strongly committed to enhancing the pursuit of scholarship by faculty and staff. We are committed to the concept of the teacher-scholar, a distinction that was emphasized by Ernest Boyer when he said that the time has come to move beyond the teaching versus scholarship debate.
Teaching and Scholarship
Teaching and scholarship are two sides of the same coin; as stated in the summary of our recent report on scholarship at NMU, Faculty scholars bring innovation to the classroom to enhance teaching.
Boyer's Four Forms
Like many academic institutions across the U.S., NMU recognizes Boyer's four forms of scholarship:
- Discovery
- Integration
- Application
- Teaching
Grants and Reserach
The Grants and Research Office facilitates grant proposal writing and submission by NMU faculty and staff. Many internal grant opportunities exist for faculty to pursue, including curriculum development and instructional improvement awards, faculty grants, and the prestigious Peter White Scholar Award. Individual colleges also provide scholarship support.
Faculty Pursuits of Scholarship
Faculty pursuits of scholarship are many and diverse. Some of our past Distinguished Faculty Award recipients include:
- Dr. David Wood (pictured above), English Department, Honors Program Director at NMU, who has been widely published and has interests in Shakespeare, English Renaissance drama, and Gender and disability studies.
- Dr. Alec Lindsay, Biology Department, who has worked on identifying and sequencing portions of the red-throated loon as part of the Genome 10K project. He has also taken students abroad on a Faculty-led study abroad course to Zambia, Africa three times, and is planning his fourth trip.
- Dr. Judy Puncochar, School of Education, Leadership, and Public Service, who has multiple publications and was a visiting scholar at the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia.
Other examples of teacher-scholars at NMU abound.
- Dr. Adam Prus, Psychology Department Head, uses funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health to conduct research on new medications for people with schizophrenia.
- Dr. Robert Winn, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, works in concert with The Upper Michigan Brain Tumor Center to explore novel treatments for patients suffering from brain tumors.
