Distinguished Teachers Honored
The University is pleased to announce the recipients of the Distinguished Teachers of the Year Awards for 2011. Başak İnce, Prof. Levent Onural, Asst. Prof. Örsan Örge, and Asst. Prof. Lars Roland Vinx were chosen for demonstrating outstanding teaching abilities and for contributing to students' academic and intellectual development. Bilkent News asked this year's Distinguished Teachers for their thoughts on receiving this award.
Instructor Başak İnce, Department of Political Science
Bilkent University is a center of excellence. It has brilliant students and very successful scholars. It is really a great honor for me to receive this prestigious award. I wish to thank to all my former and present students. I have learned a lot from them. I would like to share this award with all my colleagues and friends and students in the Department of Political Science. My teaching philosophy draws from several philosophical traditions and from my experiences both as an instructor and as a student. While we can remember only one or two wonderful teachers that touched our lives, we remember more horror stories about teachers who made our lives miserable. Thus, I try to incorporate the lessons I learned from the good ones into my teaching to touch lives of my students. My goal in education is to promote active participation, critical thinking, and civic responsibility. By doing this I want to enlighten my students. The motto of my teaching is therefore Sapere Aude! [dare to know]. "Have courage to use your own understanding" was also the motto of the Enlightenment. I love teaching very much, and I am passionate about the subjects that I teach. I believe that teaching is as valuable as research, because teaching is a way of disseminating knowledge, making it relevant to the real world, and producing future scholars. I also truly believe that enthusiasm, when honest and coming from the heart, is contagious. After all, if the instructor is not excited, why would her/his students be?
Prof. Levent Onural, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
First I have to admit that this was a great surprise on my side. Though I try my best to teach my students, I never thought I deserved such a prestigious award. I was honored many times in the past with numerous scientific and service awards, but this one definitely has a very special value, and surely it is the most emotional one: the appreciation of my students, for whom I devoted a professional lifetime, is something totally different. Knowing that the nomination material had input from a very large number of both graduates and current students, I am truly flattered; I would not even imagine about getting so many supporting responses from such a large group of past and present students. I express my deep gratitude to all my students whose number now probably exceeds 2500. Very special thanks go to my colleagues in the EEE Department for the nomination, support, and the work they devoted to putting the nominations package together.
Asst. Prof. Örsan Örge, Department of Management
I am truly honored to have received this award. My teaching is guided by the assumption that "learning business" goes well beyond acquiring lifeless theoretical frameworks delivered in classrooms. With this in mind, an overall design principle for my courses has been to challenge students to bring these frameworks closer to the realm of practice so as to help them begin developing a tacit appreciation of business dynamics and to cultivate a practice-oriented outlook that would serve as a foundation for their future professional lives. To be sure, this has been a collective accomplishment. I am grateful to my past and present students who ardently undertook this challenge. I am also indebted to my past and present mentors and colleagues who have patiently engaged with me on issues of teaching and generously contributed to my ongoing development as a business educator.
Asst. Prof. Lars Vinx, Department of Philosophy
I am very honored to receive this teaching award. I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all my students in the last few years for their interest, their patience, their participation in class, their hard work on assignments, and for all they have taught me about my job. It was a pleasure to teach them, and this award is a strong motivation for me to continue to work on improving my teaching skills further. While I try to emulate, to the best of my ability, some of the teachers that have inspired me most when I was a student, I know that I still have a long way to go to reach their level of performance. As a relative newcomer to the job of teaching, I also learned a lot from my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy, and I am deeply grateful for their help. My work here at Bilkent wouldn't have been as successful without their unfailing support. I very much hope to be able to continue to make a positive contribution to academic life at Bilkent in the future, and to go on to share my interests and knowledge with our students.