Chancellor Brady Deaton tapped professor Mike McKean on the shoulder Monday morning in the middle of his 10 a.m. capstone class with a pleasant surprise. Deaton and Commerce Bank Chairman Jim Schatz surprised him with the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and a $10,000 award.
McKean, along with College of Arts and Science professors Bethany Stone and Etti Naveh-Benjamin, were the three recipients of the award Monday. Two more faculty members will be presented with the honor later this week.
McKean helped create the convergence journalism emphasis area, teaches the convergence capstone course and serves as the director of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Student Competition. He was the second of three recipients to receive the award Monday. Two more faculty members will be surprised with the honor later this week.
A camera crew and several local reporters followed Deaton and Schatz, documenting the reactions of McKean and his students.
“I was totally shocked,” McKean said. “I mean, I was right in the middle of student presentations in class, and I get tapped on the shoulder, and it’s the chancellor, and that’s a bit of a surprise.”
The five recipients will be formally recognized at a banquet dinner later this month where the footage will be played.
Stone teaches in the Division of Biological Sciences and Naveh-Benjamin teaches psychology and Israeli culture courses, and serves as the director of the Multicultural Certificate program.
Upon receiving the award, McKean said it was easy to do his job every day because of the students he teaches, and said he hopes his award also reflected the hard work of his students.
“The School of Journalism students are always outstanding students any way you want to measure it, so it’s a lot easier to be an effective teacher when you’ve got students that want to learn and are capable of learning and really want your advice because they want a job, and they’re very passionate about it,” he said.
Senior Matt Schmertz was in McKean’s capstone class and said he wasn’t surprised McKean was recognized for the award since he views him as a mentor.
“He actually really encouraged me to become a convergence journalism student,” Schmertz said. “I was kind of confused about what exactly I wanted to do with my career up until about a year ago, and after taking the iPhone class with him, it really got me interested in mobile development and how I can relate my journalism skills to kind of a different area of interest which is the whole application development.”
McKean said his mentor is Rod Gillett, his former broadcasting professor at MU.
“He was very professional, he had very high standards, but he always had a lot of time to work with students, including me, outside the classroom or the newsroom,” McKean said. “I just try to be like that, at least to a certain extent.”
McKean said he does his best to prepare his students for the real world by teaching project-oriented classes so students can do their own research and development.
“We try to give them as real-world of experience as we can, but we also try to let them see the latest and greatest, something they might not always see in their first job, just to give them a little bit more of an idea of what is possible,” he said.
Looking toward the future, McKean said he hopes to make some of the project-oriented programs such as the android competition and the iPhone class more of a routine practice throughout the school, so students can routinely work on projects within the industry and continue to get a leg up before graduating.
“I would encourage anyone who’s still looking to find out what they want to do or who’s interested in the more technological side of journalism or mobile development, I would just say to get to know him and he can really help you and be a big asset to your college career,” Schmertz said.
