Rhineland-Palatinate State Teaching Award for Prof. Dr. Becker
Anyone starting a degree program wants professors who inspire, support, and convey course material in an understandable way. The recent presentation of the Rhineland-Palatinate Teaching Awards demonstrates that RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau succeeded this year: It received two awards. The honorees are chemistry professor Dr. Sabine Becker and education scholar Dr. Rahel Schowalter.
Every two years, the Ministry of Science and Health (MWG) presents the State of Rhineland-Palatinate Teaching Award to recognize exceptional dedication to student education. Of the ten awards presented, four are typically given to college instructors, and six to university faculty members in the state. With award recipients Sabine Becker and Rahel Schowalter, the RPTU is represented twice this year. The award recognizes their outstanding achievements in teaching and thus reaffirms the high quality of the academic environment at RPTU.
Identifying the Common Thread of a Topic
Sabine Becker has been a university professor in the Department of Chemistry at RPTU since October 2023. Her research focuses on multinuclear copper complexes and their catalytic activity, as well as on the investigation of metals in the central nervous system using fluorescent sensors.
In her teaching, she says the “wow factor” is important to her. From her own experience, she knows that rote memorization is not very effective: “Instead, I try to equip students with universal concepts. I want them to recognize and understand the underlying thread of a topic.” To this end, she likes to link theory with everyday examples during her courses and introduces students to approaches that remain valid even beyond the specific content covered.
“It’s important to me to spark students’ independent interest early on, because that makes learning much easier.” Just how successful this approach is can be seen, for example, in the “Interdisciplinary Symposium on Sustainability”: Here, participants independently develop experimental presentations and posters on current topics, which they then present to school classes. “I’m always thrilled to see how students start to get really passionate about the material,” says Becker. What does the award mean for the RPTU as a whole? “We have dedicated faculty members who make students feel well-supported and comfortable.”
Connecting to Students’ Real-Life Experiences
Rahel Schowalter conducts research and teaches at RPTU in the field of education for students with intellectual and physical disabilities. In her teaching, she, too, places great emphasis on ensuring that students truly understand the material. “I also want the course material to connect with the students’ practical experiences and real-life situations.”
Above all, it is particularly important to her that students grasp the theoretical foundations correctly. These serve as the framework for reflecting on practical activities in their future professional lives. In her seminars and lectures, she sees herself as a learner and therefore addresses the students as fellow students. She considers the State Teaching Award to be particularly valuable—precisely because it is based on the students’ evaluations: “That’s a true test of quality.”
The selection of the award recipients was carried out with the assistance of the Southwest University Evaluation Network: Surveys were conducted among students in the courses taught by the faculty members nominated for the teaching award. The award comes with a prize of 10,000 euros each, which the recipients may use freely for official purposes. The official award ceremony will take place at the end of September.