Three University of Oregon professors in the College of Arts and Sciences have received teaching awards for their excellence in the classroom.
The 2025 awardees include Associate Professor Jeanette deJong in the Department of Theatre Arts, Senior Instructor II Alexander Dracobly in the Department of History and Associate Professor Sara Weston in the Department of Psychology.
The annual Tykeson Teaching Awards are presented to one faculty member in each division of the UO’s largest college: humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. The awards were established in 2015 to recognize instructors who have exceptional outcomes in their classes. The award comes with a $2,500 cash prize.
“The College of Arts and Sciences has a proud tradition of teaching excellence. We aim to equip our students to think critically, communicate clearly and contribute meaningfully to society,” said Chris Poulsen, Tykeson Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “The 2025 Tykeson Teaching Award recipients carry this tradition forward. They are outstanding educators, respected by both their students and peers, and richly deserving of this recognition.”
View the full list of 2025 CAS Award winners.
It’s about more than a costume
A major part of Jeanette deJong’s teaching philosophy is highlighting the meaning behind one’s sense of fashion.
“It's one of the most basic human impulses to decorate oneself. I think it's really exciting,” deJong said. “I like making people think a little deeper about things they encounter every day and sparking ideas in students. It’s a carryover from when I was learning things and how exciting that was to me. I just think that's a gift I can pass on.”
DeJong has been with UO for nine years and teaches costume design, costume history and costume technology. She also works with students on costume design for many of University Theatre’s live productions. She’s also written three books for working costume designers: A Working Costume Designer’s Guide to Color (2021), A Working Costume Designer’s Guide to Fit (2023) and A Working Costume Designer’s Guide to Period Style (2025).
Phil Scher, professor and head of the Theatre Arts and Cinema Studies departments, nominated deJong for the award.
“Jeanette demonstrates success across all four pillars of teaching excellence: professional, inclusive, engaged and research-informed,” said Scher. “Even students not destined to be theatre arts majors enroll in — and benefit from — her classes. She emphasizes how to work in lab teams and how to develop skills that progress from simple concepts to complex creations.”
DeJong said this award means a lot to her and recognizes her hard work and her mission to help people reach their creative potential.
“I'm very honored. I feel that human beings like to create. It's something that's really key to us — making things and figuring out how it works. Giving people the tools and showing them what they can do to put it together gives people power and the ability to do things only they can envision. That's really powerful,” deJong said.
Statistics and the variability of people
In Sara Weston’s statistics classes, students are the most important variables.
“The fact that my work addresses the variability of (differences between) people has been influential in the way I structure my courses,” said Weston, an associate professor of psychology. “I've always started from the position that every student is different and needs an opportunity to engage in a way that plays to their strengths.”
Not everyone is pumped when they show up for a required course like Statistical Methods in Psychology, but Weston draws upon her expertise as a personality psychologist to win them over early on.
In many of her classes, students complete a weekly journal in which they can write about anything they want—a habit she began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit during her second year of teaching and inspired her to incorporate more personal moments into her class structure.
“I think it's helped me do a better job of respecting my students as people and earning their respect in turn,” she said.
She takes a unique approach to assessments, applying tools from the field to evaluate her own tests and exams as rigorously as she interrogates her research methodology. Her goal is to develop no-pressure assessments that give students credit for trying, even if they don’t get it perfect, or let them try again.
“I try to voice my approach to teaching for students, pulling back the curtain on how I've chosen to approach the structure,” Weston said. “I think that helps students see that I want to work with them, like a team, rather than create a test they have to pass to move on.”
Weston’s work teaching two of the three courses in the department’s crucial graduate statistics sequence, which is required of all Psychology PhD students, has “completely reshaped this course,” infusing it with creative, research-supported approaches, said Professor Sara Hodges, head of the Psychology Department.
“Dr. Weston is one of our university’s most caring teachers,” Hodges said. “Furthermore, her contributions in the teaching of statistics have raised the level of research within our department.”
One for the history books
Alexander Dracobly likes to have his students judge a book by a cover.
Undeterred by the age-old proverb, Dracobly says it’s an important historian research skill to quickly assess an author and their work.
“Most students won’t notice the author,” Dracobly says. “I'll bring in a pile of books to class. I'll pass them out so that there's one book for every two people, and I give each team of two five minutes to read the book by its cover.”
From that exercise, students dive into the critical skill of exploring the various ways to quickly assess a book, from who the publisher was to whether the author understands the language that’s associated with the topic.
Although he’s been recognized by his peers with the Tykeson Teaching Award, he’s also proud to have heard firsthand from students when he was voted best instructor in the Department of History in 2024.
History Department Head Ryan T. Jones says he nominated Dracobly for the Tykeson Award because as a career instructor, he’s taught more students than any other professor in the department in recent years.
“And he’s managed to do it incredibly successfully, despite almost always teaching large classes,” Jones adds. “Alex is a model for how to teach well at an R1 university.”
In his nomination letter, Jones even goes as far to say that Dracobly in teaching popular courses—and having repeat students over the years—has led to a cult-like following. One student’s review mentioned by Jones said, “I work 40 hours a week and would do anything to change my past so I could take more of his courses.”
Dracobly admits that he has an advantage compared to other history faculty members. His course offerings include popular courses—which range from large lecture halls to small class sizes—that pop in the course catalog, such as HIST 340 US Military History, HIST 428/528 History of World War I and the War in the Modern World series. With that captive audience, he uses those courses to dive into what it means to be a historian.
“Trying to explain why it is that Hitler didn’t win is already an obviously compelling historical issue,” he says. But that enables him to get students to think about the broader issue of, “How we, as historians, think about the history war; the kinds of issues we examine; how we evaluate evidence; the kinds of arguments we make.”
One way to have students think about war as a historical issue is to have students dig into logistics by studying the letters and correspondence in Napoleon’s army.
“They might think the letters are about battles,” Dracobly says. “But this is all about how you move an army corps of 25,000 men on foot from this place to another place in seven days. What kinds of problems do you have? What issues come up that you have to deal with as a commander? And they see them grappling with these issues.”
—By Kendall Baldwin, Jenny Brooks, Henry Houston and Nicole Krueger, College of Arts and Sciences