March 30, 2017
KSBN announces winners of student and faculty awards
The K-State Book Network and K-State First announce the winners for the 2015 and 2016 KSBN Awards.
The annual awards celebrate the common experiences that students, faculty and staff have at K-State with the common book. Award winners foster student engagement, enhance students' educational experience, expand the consideration of new ideas, values, and concepts in the classroom and in the university community, and utilize creative applications of the themes from the common book. The individual student and student group awards are made possible by the generosity of Bill and Debbie Miller.
KSBN hosted an awards dinner March 2 at The Table at JP's Bar and Grill — K-State's Housing and Dining partners — which included a brief ceremony to celebrate the success of these award-winning students and faculty members.
2015 Faculty Award
Be Stoney, associate professor of curriculum and instruction, has always been a great student advocate and used 2015 common book "The Other Wes Moore" as a springboard to discuss the struggles black men can experience on predominantly white campuses. Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, of which Stoney serves as an advisor, read the book as a group, presented at a national conference, and co-sponsored KSBN's last event of that year to talk about their experiences on a predominantly white campus.
2016 Student Award
Mawi Sonna, sophomore in English with a minor in Spanish, shared her immigrant experience of coming to the United States. As a learning assistant for K-State First, it was important to her that her students look at the difficulties issues introduced in "Spare Parts" through a lens of understanding and to focus on the human experience. In her poem, "When home is no home," she wrote about the concerns of Oscar and of other immigrants who are facing an uncertain future and who sometimes have difficulty defining where home is.
2016 Student Group Award
League of United Latin Americans, or LULAC, has many goals, including a focus on community service and the betterment of Latinx students at K-State. Its members were heavily involved in activities connected to "Spare Parts" and even co-sponsored KSBN's last event of the year, "Coming Out of the Shadows: A Panel Discussion," where students shared their experiences and thoughts about being undocumented at K-State. LULAC hopes to use the award money to help facilitate a statewide conference that will award high school students scholarships and introduce them to issues relevant to the Latinx community.
2016 Faculty Award
Don Saucier, associate professor of psychological sciences, has always been a great support of KSBN and finds a meaningful way to use the common book in his class every year. For "Spare Parts," he assigned students in his class missions that reinforced two key themes: collaboration and the pursuit of success despite obstacles, particularly economic obstacles. He asked his students to work in pairs to engage members of their campus community through a socially conscious objective, such as promoting positive social contacts or increasing bias awareness. He asked students to do this with little to no financial cost, with the goal of having students working together to create meaningful effects on campus with a sustainable — inexpensive or no-cost — budget of resources.
Please help KSBN congratulate these amazing people and the work they have done. KSBN looks forward to the contributions of students and faculty for the 2017 common book, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."