As appearing in SOURCE
Each year students and alumni have an opportunity to recognize the positive impact a CSU teacher has had on their lives. From numerous nominations, six teachers are selected by a committee. This year liberal arts faculty received two of the six awards: Karen Gebhardt, assistant professor in the Department of Economics, and Mark Fiege, professor in the Department of History.
Karen Gebhardt, Department of Economics
Karen Gebhardt, special assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Colorado State University, has a passion for teaching. She instructs large introductory courses in macro and microeconomics; small honors sections of these core principles courses; upper-division courses in public finance, microeconomics, and international trade; and a graduate course in teaching methods. She also teaches courses at Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam, in support of the department’s partnership with the university.
Gebhardt is an early adopter and strong advocate for technology in the classroom because she sees the difference it makes in student engagement and learning. Gebhardt has taught online courses since 2005 and coordinates her department’s online program. She also supervises and mentors the department’s graduate teaching assistants and adjunct instructors.
She is the author of The Economy Today, The Macro Economy Today, and The Micro Economy Today (14th edition, with Bradley Schiller). Before joining CSU, she worked as an economist at the USDA/APHIS National Wildlife Research Center, where she researched the interactions of humans and wildlife.
Mark Fiege, Department of History
Mark Fiege doesn’t like classrooms without windows, which is fitting for a professor specializing in the relationship between our past and our environment who enjoys sharing his love of books, ideas, writing, and landscapes with his students. He has taught American history, the history of the American West, and environmental history at Colorado State University since 1994. A Washington state native, he holds degrees from Western Washington University (B.A. ’81), Washington State University (M.A. ’85), and the University of Utah (Ph.D. ’94).
Fiege is the author of The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (2012) and other works. From 2008 to 2013, he was William E. Morgan Chair of Liberal Arts at CSU. This spring, he is the Wallace Stegner Chair of Western American Studies at Montana State University.
Rachael Johnson contributed to this story.