Lone Star College-CyFair’s Faculty Excellence Award winners, no matter their discipline, are dedicated to empowering students to learn through experience, discovery, discussion, expression and understanding to grow academically, personally and professionally.
Selected as this year’s award recipients are Cynthia Sledge, Dr. Brian Herrington, Buck Buchanan and Keith Altavilla, who teach Psychology, Music, Geography and History respectively.
Having taught full-time for 10 of her overall 14 years at LSC-CyFair, Sledge is committed to exploring every possible avenue to help students succeed, instill a lifelong love of learning, cultivate an environment of empowerment and ensure the classroom becomes a sanctuary for her students as it was, and still, is for her.
“Teaching psychology allows me to guide students on a journey of self-discovery and intellectual curiosity, equipping them with the self-confidence and tools to better understand themselves and navigate the complexities of the world around them,” said Sledge. “By fostering a growth mindset, I encourage students to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and view effort as a path to mastery. Ultimately, my goal is to create a safe and nurturing learning environment where students are excited to learn, discover and believe in their strengths and abilities.”
Dr. Herrington, an award-winning composer and LSC-CyFair’s Music Department Chair, has taught the college’s student musicians since 2006 with the last seven as a full-time instructor.
“Coming from what we now call a rural, underserved community, my teachers were my lifeline to a wider world of possibilities. The vocation of teaching allows me to likewise introduce my students to new experiences and modes of expression,” said Dr. Herrington. “My most effective teaching strategies are shaped precisely by those students who struggle with concepts, who require further explanation and novel ways of viewing problems. The classroom is a community of joint discoveries.”
Buchanan, an LSC-CyFair founding faculty member and previous Faculty Excellence Award winner (in 2019), believes personally and professionally that learning by doing and experiencing is the best teacher. He facilitates active learning, such as field data acquisition work in his Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Unmanned Aerial System/drone mapping projects.
“For me, fieldwork is the most rewarding aspect of teaching. I’ve watched the transformational process of hands-on field experiences for my students, and this forges a commitment to learning by ‘doing’,” said Buchanan, who is the UAS contact in LSC-CyFair’s Center for Geosciences (a shared resource for unique student opportunities focused on emergent geospatial technologies.) “I hope to inspire students to actively engage in every aspect of their educational journey, in and out of the confines of a classroom.”
In his ninth year teaching at LSC-CyFair, History Department Chair Altavilla aims to engage students in multiple ways and with as many different kinds of sources as possible to help them develop critical skills in reading, writing, thinking and organizing ideas.
“We talk a lot about being able to see other people’s perspectives, and History gives us the opportunity to do that, not to argue but instead to understand,” Altavilla said. “There is so much to learn and discover about the past, especially the human elements of it, how people in the past are different, but also still so much like us in important ways.”
These passionate deserving award recipients are recognized at the campus and system level.