The UNG Teaching Excellence Award for Tenure-Track Faculty recognizes those who have consistently demonstrated outstanding instruction. The recipients' qualifications may include activities designed to advance the practice of teaching and learning, to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and/or global and multicultural understanding. Additionally, the recipients' qualifications may include effective teaching strategies to enhance student learning, such as active learning, student portfolios, and classroom assessment techniques, and a commitment to enriching academic activities outside of the classroom.
Dr. Victoria Hightower, associate professor of History, earned her Ph.D. in 2011 from Florida State University. Her research focuses on the pearl trade, history, and heritage in the United Arab Emirates from 1800 to the present. She teaches courses on world history, Middle East history, gender studies, and environmental history. Her research and special interests include Middle East history, Persian Gulf history, the pearl trade, gender studies, environmental history, nationalism, and heritage studies.
Dr. Juman Al Bukhari, assistant professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. Her principal research focus is Arabic syntax. Her dissertation is an investigation of elliptical constructions. She has associated research interests in dialect variation in Arabic, Arabic sociophonetics, and syntax. She has extensive experience in Modern Standard Arabic teaching and Arabic Dialect teaching, with associated interests in English as a second language.
Jameson Brewer, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of North Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as the O'Leary Fellow at the Forum on the Future of Public Education and was named as the 2016 College of Education's Outstanding Doctoral Student. Dr. Brewer received a M.S. in Social Foundations of Education from Georgia State University and a B.S.Ed. in Secondary Education of History, with a minor in anthropology. Dr. Brewer's research interest are in the area of privatization/marketization of public education (charters, vouchers, and homeschooling), alternative teacher certification, and venture philanthropy.