The 2026 CEETL Exemplary Teaching Awardees are:
Amy Latham (LFCOB)
Amy Latham, lecturer faculty in the College of Business, is awarded CEETL’s Exemplary Teaching Award for her innovative approach to GWAR courses in which she emphasizes writing and communication as crucial ‘relationship-building’ skills to prepare students for careers in which they will need to interact professionally and respectfully with supervisors, colleagues, clients and customers. As students form teams to develop and present business proposals, she builds trust and belonging in the classroom by guiding students to request and deliver supportive peer feedback as a professional practice that promotes individual growth and drives business innovation. She brilliantly builds bridges between the classroom and business world by inviting former students to share their stories and insights on how to succeed in today’s evolving job market and workplace and to connect with them in their professional networks. Amy fosters a classroom culture grounded in care, peer support, and community-building with the professional world to empower students to grow as confident professionals and active members of their communities.
Barbara Abadia-Rexach (COES)
Awarded CEETL’s Exemplary Teaching Award for her transformative, community-engaged pedagogy that centers cultural knowledge, critical consciousness, and deep care for students. In her Latina/o Studies courses, she reimagines the classroom as a “living archive” where students engage history not only intellectually but through embodied, relational practices such as the Afro-Puerto Rican tradition of Bomba, connecting learning to lived experience, identity, and resistance. Her assignments—such as oral history interviews and collaborative digital archives—extend learning beyond the classroom, inviting students to engage with their communities, document diverse Latinx voices, and critically examine social realities including race, migration, and inequality. Through these practices, she fosters communities of care and belonging in which students see themselves as knowledge producers and develop empathy, respect, and shared responsibility. By integrating culturally sustaining pedagogy with collaborative, student-driven learning, Dr. Abadía-Rexach creates inclusive spaces that empower students to connect their personal histories with broader social contexts and to envision themselves as agents of change.
Bo Ferns (LFCOB)
CEETL is pleased to congratulate Bo Ferns, a professor in the Hospitality, Tourism, and Event Management (HTEM) department at Lam Family College of Business. Dr. Ferns teaches a range of courses from lower div GE to GWAR. She creates inclusive, student-centered learning environments to support students. Bo often uses a flipped classroom model that prioritizes in-class collaboration, writing workshops, and peer interaction, allowing students to practice professional communication in real time. She teaches critical and ethical reasoning, asking students to analyze real-world cases drawn from the hospitality industry. She partners with career advisors to help students make connections between what they’re learning and where they’re going, in their careers and professions. Equity is central to Bo’s approach, as she regularly creates assignments and classroom activities that invite students to explore their cultural identities. She makes the hidden curriculum visible to students, showing them how to succeed in academic and professional contexts, and she strives for accessibility in her classes, mindful of students’ many external obligations. Students describe her as “clear,” "supportive," and invested in their success. Finally, the committee celebrates Bo for her use of peer and community-based learning, and the centrality of strong relationships (student to student, and student to teacher) in her classes, ensuring that no student in her class struggles alone. Congratulations Dr. Ferns. Our students are lucky to have you.
Brian Strang (LCA)
CEETL congratulates Brian Strang, for his dedication to first-year writing students. Brian is a patient, process-oriented teacher who scaffolds down the recursive and difficult task of writing into manageable steps for first-year students. His assignments involve many steps, each tailored to a stage of the writing process. He encourages students to create messy rough drafts and freewrites, shows them how to turn these into hand-written -- and still messy! -- outlines, and then leverages community and peer learning in his classes so that students work together to go from rough draft to final. As Brian writes “Learning from each other helps normalize unfinished, messy work in the early stages of writing and can be liberating for students with little writing experience who have known only formulaic essay assignments.” Brian utilizes experiential learning to cultivate belonging and social bonds on our campus, but he does so in ways that also teach students the analytic skills they need to write academic arguments. For example, in addition to print texts, Brian also assigns an embodied experience that students then analyze and draw conclusions from. In a recent iteration of this approach, Brian assigned readings on the cultural politics and economics of food, and then required that students host a dinner party with each other on a budget. Assignments like these help students build friendships and develop their skills at analytic writing. Brian was an early engager when AI hit the scene, quickly exploring the technology, redesigning writing pedagogies to prevent misuse, creating critical AI modules for first-year students, publishing articles in Inside Higher Ed about the technology, and participating in our AI fellows this semester. His leadership on the AI and writing front has been invaluable. Brian’s students know and value him as an “understanding”, “super helpful”, and “respectful”; he has a well-established reputation as someone who makes a difference in the lives of our first-year students: many of them credit him for changing the way they think about belonging on this campus, about writing, and about themselves as writers. On behalf of CEETL, we congratulate Brian on his service to our students and his commitment to their literacy education.
Bryce Johnson (COSE)
Bryce Johnson, Lecturer Faculty in the School of Engineering, is recognized with the CEETL Exemplary Teaching Award for his vivid, dynamic and inclusive approach to teaching. Grounded in the belief that meaningful learning emerges through direct experience, his pedagogical approach integrates hands-on demonstrations, collaborative problem-solving, and inclusive discussion to make complex engineering principles accessible and engaging. Students first experience fluid dynamic principles through exploration of everyday objects like feeling the pressure of a water bottle - sparking curiosity and discussion - before introducing them to formal analysis. Bryce emphasizes structured peer collaboration to build both technical fluency and essential team building professional skills to co-discover answers to problems. Through innovative practices like ABCD voting cards, every student is invited to vote and actively participate in questions posted to the class, making their thinking visible and contributing to a shared learning process. By fostering curiosity, confidence, and collaboration, Dr. Johnson creates an equitable classroom environment where students feel seen, supported, and empowered to succeed in engineering and beyond.
Hsiao Yun Chu (LCA)
Hsiao-Yun Chu’s receipt of the CEETL Exemplary Teaching Award reflects her innovative, inclusive approach to design education that connects historical inquiry to students’ identities, creativity, and social awareness. In her design history courses, she reimagines traditional survey content through culturally responsive pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning, creating participatory environments where diverse perspectives are central rather than peripheral. By foregrounding topics such as the Harlem Renaissance, she invites students to critically examine how design functions as a tool for cultural affirmation and social change, while engaging them through multiple modes of learning including lecture, primary sources, discussion, and creative practice. Her assignments empower students to become designers as advocates—producing original work that reflects their own communities, concerns, and lived experiences, as seen in student-created magazine covers addressing issues from labor rights to identity and digital culture. Through this integration of critical analysis, creative expression, and inclusive pedagogy, Dr. Chu fosters a strong sense of belonging and agency, preparing students to see themselves as both designers and active participants in shaping a more just and equitable world.
Lena Yang (LFCOB)
Lena Yang, an Assistant Professor is in her fourth year in the Lam Family College of Business, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Accounting. She has designed curriculum to give her students experiential, practice-oriented learning opportunities that prepare them for real-world professional environments. Dr. Yang uses case study assignments to teach students not just the math but also the ethics of accounting, and shows them how to communicate their work in workplace and professional settings. Lena builds students’ confidence and helps them develop a professional identity; her team-based collaborative peer learning activities in class cultivate connection and a sense of belonging. As she notes, Engaging with ethics, compliance, and professional responsibility helps students build not only technical knowledge but also critical thinking and ethical awareness. I also encourage students to be active participants in the process: teams shape their own case narratives, choose their analytical angles, and contribute to decisions on target journals and authorship. The awards committee was especially struck by Lena’s efforts in this regard, to bridge technical and business content with an emphasis on the “soft” skills of audience awareness, a sense of authorship, and collaborative peer learning. One testament to Lena’s teaching is that her students have pursued case competitions and extended their projects beyond her courses. They stay connected with her even beyond graduation, allowing Lena to cultivate an active alumni network among our SFSU grads. Many of you may also recognize Lena as the Associate Director of VITA (SFSU’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program run by the accounting department) Congratulations Lena!
Lionnell “Badu” Smith (LCA)
On behalf of CEETL, we congratulate Lionnel Badu Smith, assistant professor in Communications Studies whose classrooms are guided by critical and decolonial practices that put humanization, liberation, and sociopolitical consciousness at the center of the educational experience. Students in Dr. Smith’s classes are supported in holistic learning that cultivates their critical capacities. He sums this up with a quote from bell hooks: we should aim to teach the “whole human being, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world.” Badu has published on this work in an article titled “Toward a Critical Rhetorical Pedagogy: Extending the Instruction of Communication Activism through the African American Rhetorical Tradition.” This article describes one of his many innovate classroom assignments: a protest speech where students draw from African American rhetorical traditions, traditions that emphasize “community accountability, prophetic witness, and strategic resistance.” In these and many ways, Badu connects his classrooms to SF State’s history of activism and civic engagement. He also teaches courses such as “African American Public Address” and “Decolonizing Public Speaking”; he serves in the Educational Leadership doctoral program, where he mentors doctoral students; and in his non-existent spare time, he co-coordinates COMM 150, one of our golden four courses for first-year students. Congratulations Badu. We commend your courageous, committed teaching and service to our students.
Shubhi Sachdeva (HSS)
Shubhi Sachdeva, Assistant Professor in Child and Adolescent Development, is awarded CEETL’s Exemplary Teaching Award for her (GWAR) writing courses in which she centers equity and a humanizing approach to teaching and learning. Dr. Sachdeva’s pedagogy prioritizes inclusion and belonging by inviting students, especially those who are first-generation, multilingual, and from immigrant communities, to bring the ‘fullness of their identities’ into the learning process. She guides students in applying academic theories and research to their lived experiences and future professional goals. Through scaffolded, writing assignments to build a final paper over the course of the semester, she invites students to write weekly autobiographies of their own development experience, and then critically analyze how social factors and identities intersect to shape development. By fostering a culture of care through transparency, feedback, and relational trust, she creates meaningful opportunities for connection, reflection, and growth, empowering students to draw on their own lived experiences to see themselves as capable scholars, recognizing their own positionalities in serving others, and contributing to more just communities.
Tiffany Caesar (COES)
As a recipient of CEETL’s Exemplary Teaching Award, Tiffany Caesar demonstrates a powerful commitment to community-engaged, student-centered pedagogy that bridges academic learning with real-world impact. In her Africana Studies courses, she creates what she describes as a “borderless classroom,” connecting students directly with community organizations, social movements, and local media to engage in meaningful, applied learning experiences. Through service-learning projects—such as partnering with the San Francisco Bay View newspaper—students amplify community voices, contribute to cultural preservation, and develop professional skills grounded in social responsibility and advocacy. Her teaching fosters communities of care and purpose by encouraging students to see themselves as active participants in movements for change, while also building confidence, leadership, and a sense of belonging. By centering lived experience, community partnership, and transformative praxis, Dr. Caesar empowers students to connect their academic work to broader struggles for justice and to envision themselves as agents of impact in their communities.
Zia Davidian (LIB)
Zia Davidian possesses innovative and far-reaching approaches to student-centered, accessible learning through the development of digital learning objects that support students across disciplines. As an Online Learning Librarian, she designs scalable, adaptable Canvas modules and instructional materials that meet students at their point of need, helping them build critical information literacy skills while fostering confidence and curiosity in the research process. Her “Evaluating Sources with ACT UP” Canvas module, for example, guides students through a socially conscious framework for analyzing information, encouraging them to consider issues of authority, bias, and privilege as they engage with sources. By creating flexible resources that faculty can easily integrate and customize, Davidian expands access to high-quality instruction and supports equitable learning experiences for a broad and diverse student population. Her work not only strengthens students’ academic skills but also builds a sense of agency and belonging by making research more approachable, relevant, and inclusive.
The awardees were honored at the 2026 CEETL Teaching Awards Ceremony on May 4th at 2:00-4:00 PM in LIB 121.
All who completed CEETL Programs and Courses were recognized and awarded certificates.
CEETL welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations upon request. If you would like reasonable accommodations for this event, please contact CEETL staff Cynthia Chu at cchu4@sfsu.edu as soon as possible so your request may be reviewed.