|
Susanne Siepl-Coates Upon recommendation of students and faculty in the College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University is privileged to acknowledge the outstanding record in undergraduate teaching of Professor Susanne Siepl-Coates. Diverse, unique and exceptional are among the many words that might be used to describe Professor Siepl-Coates' teaching contributions to the Department of Architecture. Her key abilities as a teacher are characterized by initiative, focus, determination, rigor and generous criticism. A case in point is a recent fifth-year studio, organized as a community-based service class focused on the design of a therapy center in Michigan. Students in the course interacted personally with the center's physicians, took a field trip to the site, conducted in-depth literature research and integrated their findings into their design proposals. The outcome was an outstanding three-volume publication that received significant awards and national attention for its exemplary effort in alternative design for healing environments. Professor Siepl-Coates' contributions to our design curriculum go far beyond her architecture studio assignment in any given semester. Her contributions are well established and of seminal importance to the teaching mission of the entire College, as she played a critical role in rewriting, testing and refining the set of exercises that now form the core of the environmental design studies program. To create such a carefully crafted and detailed set of exercises that all members of our diverse faculty can successfully teach is a major accomplishment. Our College administrators and faculty have repeatedly expressed their delight at the solid foundation of skills and understandings that the exercises developed by Professor Siepl-Coates provide to our first-year students. It should also be noted that Professor Siepl-Coates has brought other innovative and highly successful approaches to teaching our freshman studios. These include her conviction that skill development in verbal/visual communication should be combined with instruction in design vocabulary and the formal/spatial principles of design. Because of her versatility, she has taught at every studio level in our College and has served many times as studio year-level coordinator where she has brought skill, clarity of learning outcomes and focused organization to the task. She says, "Experiencing the human relationship and seeing students develop their design skills and mature into professionals is what I find most rewarding about teaching." Professor Siepl-Coates has also furthered the aims of the scholarship of teaching that stand as a model for our entire faculty. Her innovative teaching approaches have resulted in two papers, co-authored with a teaching colleague, that were presented at national conference, and one of her manuscripts is currently being reviewed for publication in a prestigious national journal. All of Professor Siepl-Coates' accomplishments are all the more extraordinary when it is realized that, in addition to her many teaching assignments, she has served a number of years in several administrative capacities as well. Despite these demands on her time, her scholarship and teaching accomplishments are substantial and significant, and she clearly exhibits the capacity for continued growth as a scholar and teacher. Kansas State University and the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design are most fortunate to have Professor Susanne Siepl-Coates as an exemplary and esteemed member of our community. She is most deserving of this prestigious award. |