Kupfer earns Gen Ed award for innovative teaching, commitment to his students

John Kupfer's students are easy to pick out in a crowd; they are the ones with sunburns.

Kupfer's students can be found taking tours of the Joseph Wood Krutch Cactus Garden or checking out the foliage around Old Main. This is all part of a Natural Sciences 101 class that Kupfer has been teaching for four years, Earth's Environments: Introduction to Physical Geography.

Kupfer, a geography and regional development associate professor, was recently awarded a Provost's General Education Award for his innovative teaching techniques and his dedication to undergraduate education.

"I incorporate a lot of stories, slides and pictures from my own research and I try to relate my teaching to things people can relate to," Kupfer said of his teaching style. Among those things he discusses in class are Arizona monsoons, the patterns of vegetation on Mt. Lemmon affecting adaptations of species and topographic maps of local areas.

"He is very good at simplifying complex processes so his students can understand them. He takes examples from everyday life to make the concepts approachable," said geography graduate student Christine Hansell, who worked as a Kupfer's teaching assistant for three semesters.

Tyler Jones, a former geography teaching assistant and student of Kupfer's, moved from Memphis to attend UA because he wanted to work with Kupfer.

"It was a big decision for me to decide to come out here and become a graduate student in order to work with John," he said.

Jones took two undergraduate classes of Kupfer's at the University of Memphis prior to following him to UA.

"He explains things really well and he has a sense of humor that is evident in the classroom," Jones said.

An example of this humor is the "top 10 ways to study for midterms" list Kupfer created for his students last semester.

"My favorite was ÎWrite songs about the ideas to help you remember the ideas' which he then illustrated by singing a little song about orographic uplift," Hansell said.

Kupfer's NATS 101 class focuses on climate, biogeography, soils and landforms. This is the first semester since Kupfer came to UA that he did not teach the class; the break came so he could teach more graduate level courses.

"It was kind of funny that I won the award now," he said.

Kupfer also won the University of Memphis Distinguished Teaching Award, a university-wide honor, in 1998, the year before he arrived at UA. He taught there for five years.

Kupfer earned his bachelor's degree at Valparaiso University in 1988, his master's in 1991 and doctorate in 1995 at the University of Iowa.

His primary expertise is in the collection and analysis of ecological field data, with interests in forest ecosystem modeling and the use of remote sensing techniques.