Biology Lecturer Irene Perry has received the University of Texas Permian Basin’s President’s Teaching Award.
The President’s Teaching Award recognizes faculty for sustained excellence in teaching. Above and beyond an individual exemplary class, this kind of sustained excellence in teaching incites intellectual curiosity in students, inspires colleagues, and makes students aware of significant relationships between the classroom and the world at large, information from the university said.
Since coming on full time at UTPB in 2002, Perry has been involved in a variety of endeavors.
She has served on the sustainability committee, advising the Coalition of Organized Gaming (COG), and volunteering with the local and regional science and engineering fairs. Perry serves as president of the STEM Academy advisory board and recently started serving on the Odessa Arts board.
Last semester, Perry and a couple of her students received funding through the HSI-STEM grant to complete a research project on digitizing the UTPB herbarium.
The purpose of this project was to capture high resolution images of the plants and databasing the details that pertained to each specimen. The digitization of the herbarium allows other scientists access to the information remotely and it reduces the possibility of the specimens to be damaged.
Perry has also been an adjunct at Odessa College and UTPB.
She grew up in Denton as one of eight children. Her mom still lives there.
Perry earned a bachelor of arts in biology and a master of science in plant physiology, both from Texas A&M University.
When she heard about the President’s Teaching Award Perry said she was pleasantly surprised. She had received it in 2022 but word was just recently spread on social media about it.
“I was very honored because there’s a lot of wonderful (teachers) here on campus,” she said.
The recognition doesn’t make her want to work harder, but it makes her want to work more intentionally. When she thought about what she does, why she does it and how she does it, it made her realize there was a bigger pattern than what she thinks about day to day or week to week.
She wants to maintain things that work and work on things that don’t.
“Students change, the technology changes what’s the best way to present information. Something I’m doing right now, the university offered training … through the HSI STEM (Hispanic Serving Institutions-Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program. Some things I was aware of and some things I didn’t know about. … It’s good for me to learn new things,” Perry said.
It is a STEM mini course for faculty at Hispanic serving institutions to learn how to apply culturally responsive teaching.
“So to create a more inclusive and engaging STEM learning spaces for Latinx students. That’s been good. There are lots of things I’ve thought about and they ask us to look at assignments from our syllabus to make it more inclusive; more understandable. They give examples of misunderstanding in standard academic language that you see in things that I had never thought about …,” Perry said.
She added that she goes through the publisher’s resources to screen for things like that and figure out how she would say it, how she has said it and make sure that the language and the description of questions and examples matches how they’ve been explaining it in class.
As a junior in college, she spent a year in Mexico as an exchange student, which she said gives her empathy with her students.
“I took classes in Spanish as a Mexican student; standard university classes. So I took microbiology, anatomy, physiology, genetics, enough t maintain my degree plan. All my other credits were things that were inserting … literature, psychology, sociology, archaeology; whatever was available on the schedule that worked,” Perry recalled.
“It was very hard. I feel like I was ready because Spanish was my minor in college, but it was hard work to take classes in a second language and in a different culture. I would see that I was messing up or gotten something that I thought I misunderstood and so I try to make things transparent and clear to my students because I’ve had that experience as a student,” she added.
She added that the technology wasn’t available back then to translate the way there is now. You had to use a thesaurus and dictionaries.
One of her students, Analiza Rayos has worked with her on the HSI-STEM project.
“Ms. Perry is so kind and patient with all her students. She creates a bond with each one of them. She definitely deserves this award because she works so hard. She is helping me, and my colleagues gain knowledge and experience through research. If I ever have a problem, I know I can always turn to her,” Rayos said in an email.
Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Rajalingam Dakshinamurthy congratulated Perry on the recognition.
“Working with Irene, who represents excellence in the teacher-scholar model in the classroom and beyond, is an honor. While the awards recognize the achievements of the past year, which were exceptionally challenging as we adjusted to the pandemic, they also encompass several years of distinction and dedication. I’m proud to recognize Irene for her impact on our students,” Dakshinamurthy said.
Perry didn’t plan to go into education. The reason she studied biology was to do environmental consulting and field ecology work, which she has done some of in her professional life.
“But I found that teaching worked for my personal life and schedule. My husband is a professor on campus …,” Perry said.
She and her husband, Robert, a political science professor, have three children and two grandchildren. He grew up in Los Angeles.
“I had wonderful science teachers. … I felt a debt to the teaching profession and I still enjoy it. I still have fun with the students looking at experiments, looking through the microscope, even though I’ve seen them dozens of times over the years because I mainly teach the general biology classes and the labs,” Perry said.
