Awards, Honors, Publications, etc.
Ken Womack
Kenneth A. Womack (associate professor of English and head of the Division of Arts and Humanities) has received the Alumni/Student Award for Excellence in Teaching and has been named a 2006 Penn State Teaching Fellow.
The Alumni Association, the Undergraduate Student Government, and the Graduate Student Association established the Penn State Teaching Fellow Award in 1985. The award honors distinguished teaching and provides encouragement and incentive for excellence in teaching. Recipients are expected to share their talents and expertise with others throughout the University system during the year following the award presentation.
Womack has previously been honored with Penn State Altoona's Grace D. Long Faculty Excellence Award, which recognized his teaching, research, and service.
A faculty member at Penn State Altoona for the last nine years, Womack regularly teaches composition and English literature survey courses, as well as seminars on ethics and literature, reading the academic novel, literary love, film as a social critique, and literature and the family. In addition, he teaches general education courses on the textual history of the Beatles for Penn State Altoona's Communications degree program.
One nominator shared that Womack "has a rare gift for teaching—that is sure, but his gift extends well beyond the classroom. It is not enough for Ken to be an outstanding teacher; he is constantly providing his students with opportunities to grow."
In what has become an end-of-the-semester tradition, he bakes a chocolate cake for his students to share on the final day of class. Of this experience, Womack said, "When my students and I delve into the cake at the end of each semester, I find that the event has now developed into something larger, a moment when we reflect on our progress—both as students and as people—during the previous year. We talk about the literary works that we have recently encountered; we explore their remarkable impact upon our lives and our sensibilities; and, perhaps most importantly, we consider our places in the world and our interrelationships with others."