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Untitled Dear TC nominating committee, 

I am writing to nominate Monica Chan for the Morton T. Embree Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. I am an instructor (along with my advisor, Asst. Prof. Paulo Blikstein) of TC’s new courses, Beyond Bits and Atoms (MSTU 5197 and MSTU 5199; course website at: http://beyondbitsandatoms.org/). These courses are an exciting addition to TC’s offerings, combining a lecture course focused on theories of learning with theories of media and technology with a lab course focused on designing and building educational technologies in TC’s new educational makerspace. They are also logistically-involved. Students are required to design, build, code, and fabricate working educational technologies, and to develop them with real-world users. We invited educators, designers, technologists, and businesspeople to provide feedback in a mid-course evening of critiques. 

Monica, who serves as a TA for both courses, has been instrumental in pulling this off. She was a thoughtful participant in re-designing the course for the TC context and population, and has regularly taken on leadership roles within the course, planning and leading several modules during lecture and lab. She has also been the rock-solid core of our teaching team, assigning assessment work and checking that it gets done on time, coordinating office hours in the lab (and making sure it works for all the students). Her work has led to a substantially better-organized, more coherent learning experience for students. 

Monica has also been deeply committed to meeting the needs of individual students in the class. She regularly checks in on the pulse of the class and on individuals. In our planning meetings, she has repeatedly brought up individual student needs, expressed to her by students or evident in their work, and suggested ways we can revise the course to better meet these needs. This course involves quite a bit of groupwork, and she has been an effective conduit and mediator of interpersonal challenges that have come up in groupwork. Her warmth and active curiosity has dramatically improved students’ experiences in the class, helping them feel heard, known, respected, and cared for, as they take on ambitious projects. Her work was strongly appreciated in students’ responses to the mid-semester course survey. 

Monica has been an excellent TA whose work in Beyond Bits and Atoms has  substantially improved the learning environment of the course, and its contribution to TC’s broader community of practice. As a way of recognizing her dedication, I strongly nominate her for this award.