Teaching Medal Award Winner

Julia Eve Hammer
Manoa

Julia Eve Hammer is a professor, volcanologist and experimental petrologist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at UH Manoa.

Hammer is considered to be a leader in her field in the development of innovative classroom techniques designed to enhance student learning and develop critical thinking.

The importance she places on an interactive classroom atmosphere is demonstrated through innovative teaching practices, including lecture tutorial, inter-teaching, and clicker-assisted lectures. At the upper-division level, she shows students how concept mapping can make sense of technical jargon. For graduate level students, she stresses sanity-checking calculations against reasonable inferences, turning assignments into a hypothesis test.

Among Hammer’s former students are geology and geophysics professors and science teachers in high schools, who have been deeply influenced by her and have modeled their own teaching practices on their former experiences of learning with her.