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Goodrich faculty member receives Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award

Richardson teaching a class.

Omaha – Todd Richardson, an associate professor in the Goodrich Scholarship Program, was a recipient of a 2019 Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award. These awards were established in 1997 to honor distinguished teaching in the classroom and are presented to nine faculty members at the annual Faculty Honors Convocation. Peer committees in UNO colleges choose recipients. Richardson was the recipient for the College of Public Affairs and Community Service.

Richardson has been with Goodrich for eight years, having joined the faculty after completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Missouri in 2011. Within Goodrich, he teaches English Composition, Autobiographical Reading and Writing, and Perspectives on American Culture, which is the program’s cornerstone course. He also teaches courses for English, the Honors Program, and the Division of Continuing Studies. In the fall, he will be teaching a literature course on Ghost Stories through the English department. As a graduate of the Division of Continuing Studies program he is especially proud of a capstone course he developed and taught for the Division in Fall 2018.

There is nothing quite like a class full of Goodrich Scholars.”

 Todd Richardson, associate professor, Goodrich Scholarship Program
Richardson has been teaching for almost twenty years. His first semester teaching was in 2001, when he was a graduate teaching assistant in the UNO Deparment of English graduate program. He credits his success as a teacher to the early instruction and inspiration he received there, especially from Professor Nora Bacon, who recently retired as head of UNO’s First Year Writing Program, and Professor Susan Maher, former chair of the UNO Department of English. As well, he cites the spirited teaching and guidance provided by Goodrich faculty and staff as motivation to always provide the best instruction he can. Above all, however, he says he is inspired daily by the incredible students of the Goodrich Scholarship Program. “I never dreamed I’d get to work with such brilliant and original students,” he says. “I have taught at a lot of institutions and within a lot of programs, and there is nothing quite like a class full of Goodrich Scholars.”

In his teaching, Richardson promotes creative thinking above all else, believing that the best ideas in a class are those generated by the students themselves. In addition to his research on folklore — Implied Nowhere: Absence and Folklore Studies, a book he co-authored with Shelley Ingram and Willow Mullins, will be released in June of this year — he is researching ways to promote creative citizenship through innovative teaching.