Kathleen Condray Named One of the Most Creative Teachers in the South

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Kathleen Condray, associate professor of German

Kathleen Condray, an associate professor of German in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and an Honors College faculty member, has been selected as one of “the most creative teachers in the South” by Oxford American magazine. Condray also earned her bachelor’s degree in German from the University of Arkansas and received the prestigious Sturgis Fellowship as an undergraduate.

"As part of the release of our new education issue, we wanted to highlight the most dynamic and innovative teachers in the South,” Warwick Sabin, publisher of Oxford American, wrote in an email. “Dr. Condray made the list as a result of her engaging and creative methods, which help her students discover the relevance and importance of learning a new language. As a proud Sturgis Fellow and U of A alumnus, I couldn't be more pleased that Dr. Condray received this well-deserved recognition."

Condray’s pedagogical methods range from using a Bavarian Barbie doll to demonstrate prepositional phrases to her German students to taking honors humanities students on a hike through Devil’s Den State Park after reading Friedrich Gerstaecker’s Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (The Regulators [Vigilantes] in Arkansas), an 1846 description of Arkansas’ “Wild West” days.

“I’m a big believer in getting students outside of the classroom,” Condray said. She recently took a group of graduate students to Fayetteville’s Evergreen Cemetery after they had finished reading Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" (The Sorrows of Young Werther), an 18^th-century novel in which the protagonist commits suicide due to unrequited love.

“It’s easy to dismiss Werther, due to the exaggerated emotional nature of the book’s language, coming on the heels of the Enlightenment – you want to tell him to get over her already! But I wanted the students to think about the underlying message, and the finality of death,” she said.

Condray also challenges her students to approach course material in a creative way. Last year, for example, students in her honors humanities class, subtitled “the Birth of Modernity,” conveyed the game-changing ideas of thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Joseph Conrad in team-produced videos under five minutes in length. “It was a really open-ended assignment – here are the guidelines, here’s what you can do: go,” said Stephanie McCullough, a junior music and psychology major. Her team developed a stop-action animation sequence that represented the advent of modernism with a hand, a Sharpie and paper cutouts. “It was a good exercise not to have boundaries,” McCullough added. “We tried to fit the entire semester into four minutes, and that takes a lot of thinking outside of the box.”

Condray is also passionate about the importance of students pursuing internships, primary research in laboratories, and other activities that prepare them for life beyond campus, and many of her students have been selected for such opportunities thanks to her encouragement. Jacquelynn Bensing, a recent graduate of the German program who completed a Fulbright teaching scholarship in Germany and has been accepted into the City Year Corps teaching program in Washington, D. C., wrote: "I always brag about how awesome the U of A German department is and especially brag about my amazing mentor, Kathleen Condray. Now I have press clippings to back it up!”

Abashed but pleased by the flood of well wishes posted by former students to her Facebook page, Condray wrote: “It was an honor to be included, but the real honor is working with our excellent students at the U of A. I also am lucky to come from a long line of terrific teachers, to have learned the trade from great professors, and to be in a department in which (I believe literally) almost every other faculty member is a Fulbright College Master Teacher, including my colleague Dr. Jennifer Hoyer, who was accorded that well-deserved honor last year."

Condray, who teaches in the department of world languages, literatures and culture, received the Fulbright College Master Teacher Award in 2007.