The Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching

The Cherry Award is considered an “American version of the Nobel Prize” for teaching.

As the recipient of the 2020 Cherry Award, I was honored and humbled to receive a prize of $250,000 and to have the opportunity to teach in residence at Baylor University for the spring of 2021. During this semester, I taught an upper-level seminar in the literatures of food, “Books that Cook,” and a workshop in creative nonfiction writing, “Moments of Truth”; I also gave lectures, workshops, and a creative reading; helped to organize a Summit on Empathetic Teaching; participated in a research panel; and engaged in experiential learning projects with my students.

 
 

The Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching at Baylor University is designed to honor professors of excellence across disciplines, to stimulate discussion in the academy about the value of teaching, and to encourage departments and institutions to value their own great teachers. The award was created by Robert Foster Cherry, who earned his A.B. from Baylor University in 1929 and enrolled in the Baylor Law School in 1932, passing the Texas State Bar Examination the following year. With a deep appreciation for how his life had been changed by significant teachers, he made an exceptional bequest to establish the Cherry Award program to recognize excellent professors and to bring them in direct contact with Baylor University students. The first award was made in 1991 and has been awarded biennially ever since.

 

Baylor Student Collaborative Projects

English 4374: Books that Cook project with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty (BCHP)

For this assignment, Books that Cook students took Martin Luther King Jr.’s audacious belief seriously: that all people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies in order to support the work of their minds and the freedom of their spirits. The Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty (BCHP) is an organization that fights against hunger, believing that having access to fresh, healthy, and abundant food should be a basic human right—including on Baylor's campus. To help further this mission and attempt to destigmatize food insecurity, Books that Cook students worked in groups of two to collaborate on BCHP blog posts highlighting the many initiatives this organization engages to help assuage hunger at Baylor. These include blog posts on BCHP's Free Farmers' Market, the Fridge Project, SNAP for College Students, the Store (a free food pantry), the World Hunger Relief Farm, and the work of the Campus Kitchen group—as well as an overview of all BCHP partnerships.

PWR 3384: Creative Nonfiction project with the Martin Museum of Art: Word+Image

For this collaboration with Baylor’s staff at the Martin Museum of Art, student writers spent an hour with an artwork from the museum’s permanent collection, and then they wrote a microessay in conversation with this object. This process is called an act of ekphrasis, which comes from a Greco-Roman exercise in which a writer produces a vivid description of a piece of visual art. Ekphrasis is a combination of ek (see) and phrasis (speak), meaning “to call an inanimate object by its name.” And so the students’ essays tell stories of their selected paintings, drawings, and prints—while telling their own stories, too. As Jeanette Winterson has said, “I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.” This collaborative work culminated in a “Word + Image” exhibition at the Martin Museum, combined with a creative reading of the students’ essays, recorded and released on the Martin’s website.

 

Cherry Award Finalist Lecture

Just Food: Social Justice and the Literatures of Food

Baylor University, 21 October 2019

 

Cherry Award Recipient Lecture

Good to Eat, Good to Think, Good to Do

Baylor University, 2 February 2021

A Recipe for Empathy: Storytelling, the Empathetic Imagination, and Social Justice Pedagogy

ROBERT FOSTER CHERRY SUMMIT ON EMPATHETIC TEACHING

Academy for Teaching and Learning, Baylor University, 12 March 2021

Jennifer Cognard-Black: Empathetic Teaching

PROFESSORS TALK PEDAGOGY PODCAST

Academy for Teaching and Learning, Baylor University, March 2021

Nineteenth-Century Research Group

BAylor University Department of English

“The Embodiment of Recipes, Victorian Literature, and Food Justice Pedagogy.” Food Justice, Theology, and Literature Panel.

Dr. Matthew Whelan, Dr. Lesa Scholl, Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black, and Dr. Jenny Howell gathered for a virtual roundtable discussion on “Food Justice, Theology, and Literature.” Watch the full conversation, including Q&A, here!

Creative Arts Experience (CAE) Reading for Baylor University

A creative reading of J. Annie MacLeod's (aka, JCB's) short stories "Daughter Mother Daughter" from Story Magazine and "Gasoline" from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for Baylor's CAE program, Spring 2021.

Press