Londie Martin, assistant professor of rhetoric and writing, has been selected as the 2020 Faculty Excellence in Teaching award winner for the UA Little Rock College of Social Sciences and Communication. 

Martin regularly teaches digital narrative, digital nonfiction, document design, writing on the web, and composition I and II, as well as rhetoric communication courses for the Donaghey Scholars Program.

Whether it’s first-year composition or upper-level and graduate courses, Martin asks students to do a self-assessment of their work for major course projects. To help students craft their self-assessment, she provides assignment sheets, objectives, and rubrics to help them evaluate not just the products they compose, but also their process and the labor associated with it.

“The first class I took with her was a document design course that I was terrified of being in,” said Tori Watson, a graduate student at UA Little Rock. “I had no design experience and was nervous that I wouldn’t succeed. For every project, she gave in-depth responses on what worked and what we could improve upon, and I left that class feeling confident in my abilities because of her instruction, encouragement, and feedback.”

Kristen McIntyre, associate professor of rhetoric and writing, said that she learned much from Martin’s thoughtful and transformative pedagogical practices while they co-taught a rhetoric communication course for the Donaghey Scholars Program.

“Londie’s excellence in teaching is evident in her facilitation of authentic collaborative learning with her students,” McIntyre said. “While providing clear expectations in her assignment descriptions and rubrics, Londie invites students to play with the ideas and techniques that are explored in the course content. It has been extremely helpful to my own pedagogy to be able to observe the ways that Londie is able to challenge and support students.”

Martin holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin, a master’s degree in rhetoric, composition, and professional communication from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English from the University of Arizona.