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Excellence in Teaching, 2019

Alecia Magnifico is a teacher of future teachers who teaches to the future. Since joining the faculty in 2013, she’s exercised considerable skills that have profoundly impacted the English composition and teaching programs in distinctly 21st century ways. She’s developed new courses — steeped in her own qualitative and quantitative research — to help students understand literacy in the digital media age. To ensure her students’ job-readiness, she’s created mandatory undergraduate practicums and shepherds students into graduate internships. She also works with teachers across the state to better prepare ��ʤ������’s high school students for college literacy.

Around a seminar table and in office hours, Professor Magnifico displays potent qualities that don’t fit as neatly on a C.V. She is caring, accessible, thoughtful and generous, say her students. She is particularly adept at building community. With high expectations and deep intellect, she creates an environment that encourages risk-taking, built on a strong sense of respect.

“Students learn successfully when they engage in real tasks from their discipline and participate in real conversations and communities,” she says. She encourages students to enter the discourse communities of their fields and prepares them to contribute meaningfully as professionals.

One such professional explains Professor Magnifico’s impact this way: “Many educators in my life have inspired me to become an educator, but Alecia alone has inspired me to become myself first, and to bring that identity — that sureness in self, that flexibility in growth, that real person that students can truly connect to — into the classroom, and then to educate. Alecia is a living example of modeling how considering the whole student — and the whole teacher — brings a classroom community to life.”