Audrey Mingela, Professor, Mathematics, and Anita Süess Kaushik, Associate Professor, World Languages, have been named 2019 League Excellence Awards recipients. These awards are sponsored by the League for Innovation in the Community College to celebrate outstanding contributions and leadership by community college faculty.
Mingela and Süess Kaushik will be honored, along with other outstanding faculty from community colleges across the country, at the annual Innovations Conference in March in Seattle.
Mingela, who also is the Math Department chair, has been teaching full-time at Schoolcraft since the fall of 2000. She currently teaches Beginning Algebra (Math 053), Intermediate Algebra (Math 113), Calculus I (Math 150) and Calculus III (Math 240).
“I am thrilled to have been chosen for this award,” she said. “It is an honor to be selected and recognized, especially among a group of people that I greatly admire.”
Süess Kaushik, who began her career at Schoolcraft in 2006, teaches all levels of French (traditional as well as online) and German courses. She also organizes international trips for Schoolcraft students – 2020 will be her 14th tour.
“I am very passionate about teaching world languages and feel tremendously honored about getting this recognition,” she said. “I truly love what I do and am still as excited and motivated today as I was many years back when I first stepped into a classroom as an instructor.”
Each works hard to bring students a great learning experience.
“I’ve enjoyed making connections with my students and to share in their success,” Mingela said. “They inspire me to continually edit and perfect what I do in the classroom. I am always impressed by the dedication and contributions that are made by the entire team at Schoolcraft College, and consider myself blessed to be part of the Schoolcraft family.”
For Süess Kaushik, that means incorporating culture-based components to language instruction.
“My goal is to provide a holistic cultural experience when teaching a language, thus I integrate music, cuisine, cinema, history and contemporary events into the curriculum,” she said. “It makes me very happy when students reach out through evaluations or in person and tell me that they are proud of their achievements, have acquired the confidence to converse in the target language, and enjoyed our cultural discussions.”