Kent Lightfoot Receives Distinguished Teaching Award

Kent Lightfoot, Professor of Anthropology, was awarded one of three Distinguished Teaching Awards in the Social Sciences for 1995. This was the first year that the Division of the Social Sciences has had such an awards program. It was initiated by Dean William Simmons as a way to recognize the extraordinary teaching that is common within the Social Sciences at Berkeley, given that the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Awards can only recognize just a few, and from all units across campus. Simmons is convinced that the calibre of teaching in the Social Sciences - perhaps the most active teaching division on the campus - is worthy of its own award program. For 1995, the Distinguished Teaching Award was oriented to recognize those professors who demonstrated "sustained excellence in the teaching of large lecture classes". Indeed, as the some 1200 students who have taken courses from Professor Lightfoot over the past 6 years know and know well, he is a professor of excellence in all his classes, but he indeed has a gift for teaching in large lecture classes. In student evaluations, Kent is consistently praised for his humor, for his being a "real human being", for his abilities to convey a great deal of material in a coherent, engaging, and compelling style. He has taught hundreds of students in the American Cultures classes, such as the Historical Anthropology of California or the California Frontier; he has introduced hundreds more students to archaeology in his ever popular Introduction to Archaeology. His Graduate Student Instructors praise him for teaching them as well as the undergraduates: "he provides the very best model of a teacher and what we should want to be", writes one recent PhD in archaeology who worked with Kent.

An awards ceremony was held in May 1995, where Kent was presented with a citation and a check. As expected, he came with his characteristic Hawaiian shirt, his special sense of humor, and a little bit of disbelief. But for those of us who have heard Kent in the classroom, we weren't surprised at all: his teaching extraordinaire was at last being recognized. Congratulations to Kent, and many thanks from the undergraduates who have benfitted immeasurably from your patience, dedication, well-prepared lectures and humanity. Many thanks from the rest of the archaeological community here, for while we know well the excitement and fascination with things archaeological, its wonderful to have a colleague who can communicate this so effectively to others.