Professor Michele Troy

Pedagogy: it’s an old fashioned word with a simple meaning. Pedagogy is defined as the art of teaching, and Michele Troy, an assistant professor of English, takes the art of teaching to new levels of creativity and imagination.

For her efforts, Troy recently received the University of Hartford’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Pedagogy which recognizes faculty members for exceptional dedication, innovation, and effectiveness in their teaching. Troy is constantly seeking out imaginative and different ways of making her students care about what they are studying. “I really try to find out what engages my students and how to relate to their lives and concerns,” she says.

To encourage her students to informally develop and share their own ideas about what they were reading, Troy decided to introduce an online reading log into her English literature class. “Talking about literature can be intimidating, but students are comfortable communicating online. Logs are a way of loosening them up and making them more confident that they have something to say.” v For her composition class, Troy motivates her students to do rigorous revisions on their written personal narratives by offering them the opportunity to produce audio versions of their essays which are recorded in a class-produced CD. “The students have a real incentive to work on revisions. They are writing something other people are going to hear. They can see that what they write has a power beyond the classroom.”