Anthropologist Bonnie Glass-Coffin is USU's seventh Utah Carnegie Professor of the Year in nine years.

Glass-Coffin was nominated for the prestigious undergraduate teaching award by peers, students and administrators. The U.S. Professors of the Year program, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and TIAA-CREF, is the only national award program that recognizes college professors for their teaching.

Glass-Coffin takes her students out of the classroom - way out of the classroom - for an experience that is comparable to graduate school. She developed an international ethnographic field school in Huanchaco, Peru, and recruits an adventurous band of students each summer for a five-week cultural immersion. Students interview villagers for their research projects, observe local rituals and take part in traditional celebrations.

Student Elizabeth Cox says of her five weeks in Peru, "I learned more about anthropology and myself than in my previous three years of undergraduate work."

Student projects bolster the villagers' pride in a 2,500-year cultural heritage that is beset with change. As tourism replaces the traditional livelihood of subsistence farming, villagers must adapt to a faster-paced, more competitive economy.

In the classroom, Glass-Coffin's students are also given a graduate-school-level experience. Glass-Coffin guides students as they develop presentations for professional meetings and conferences and create museum exhibits based on their ethnographic fieldwork. The exhibits are displayed in the department's Museum of Anthropology, where they are viewed by hundreds of public school students.

Fluent in Spanish, Glass-Coffin volunteers on behalf of Latino families in Cache Valley, helping them learn English, communicate with school officials and reduce school drop-out rates.

Student Corey Tyler Larsen says that Glass-Coffin empowers students. "She invites students to be passionate about their field work. When I took her class, I wasn't even sure what anthropology was. She challenged the class to think about life from a different perspective. She never took sides on issues. She respected everyone's point of view." -Nadene Steinhoff '84

Meet our other Utah Professors of the Year.

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