A Wartburg College professor is a finalist for a national award recognizing early-career faculty for teaching, research and community service.
Dr. Zak Montgomery, assistant professor of Spanish, is among 10 finalists for the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement presented by Merrimack (Massachusetts) College’s Center for Engaged Democracy, which promotes academic programs focused on civic and community engagement.
Montgomery, who has taught at Wartburg since 2009, has developed a new community-based, service-learning Spanish course, Latinos in the United States, with students working alongside Latinos in the local community on issues of mutual importance.
Among its projects, the course paired Wartburg students with sixth-grade students at Waterloo’s George Washington Carver Academy, including many Latino English Language Learners. They documented their individual “American Dreams” (Sueño Americano) in text and photos.
Montgomery is a co-founder of the annual Midwest Undergraduate Conference in the Humanities, where students present papers, give readings and recitals, and offer displays on such topics as politics, religion, culture, crime and women’s issues.
In addition, he teaches Spanish language, Hispanic culture and cinema, and Luso-Brazilian culture courses and regularly leads a four-week May Term course to Costa Rica with a service-learning component. He has led cultural immersion courses to the Wartburg West urban studies program in Denver, Colorado, and to Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Montgomery earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and business from Kalamazoo (Michigan) College, his master’s degree in Hispanic literature and a Ph.D. in Portuguese literature from Indiana University-Bloomington.
The award honors Ernest Lynton, who was a member of the physics faculty at Rutgers (New Jersey) University with a commitment to socially responsible teaching, research and service. He was the founding dean of Rutgers’ innovative Livingston College, which is dedicated to learning through engagement in societal problems.
More information about the finalists is at http://www.engageddemocracy.org/2014-lynton-award-finalists.html.