[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Dr. Mary Lee Webeck is director of education at Holocaust Museum Houston and director of the Museum’s Warren Fellowship for Future Teachers. This professional development program for teachers in training brings pre-service teachers to the Museum for an intense study of the content and pedagogy necessary to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. Until December 2008, Dr. Webeck was an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas in Austin. The last course she taught at the university was a Signature Course for freshman students on the topic of genocide.
Dr. Webeck received an Academic Innovation Award from the RKG Center for her course, “Philanthropy and Education.” Previously, Dr. Webeck was adjunct assistant professor for the Curriculum and Instruction Department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. When she was a teacher at Klondike Elementary School in West Lafayette, Dr. Webeck’s multi-age fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms became a district model. She co-developed the school’s intermediate multi-age curriculum and created a social studies unit called “We the People,” in which students researched and debated legal issues with help from practicing attorneys. She replaced traditional parent-teacher conferences with student-led conferences, a practice adopted by other teachers. Always active in philanthropy, Dr. Webeck mounted a significant fundraising campaign to benefit a student who was stricken with an inoperable brain tumor, and was in need of experimental treatment. Dr. Webeck is a National Board Certified teacher.
