ByGeorge!

January 2007

Geography’s Chacko Named D.C. Professor of the Year

CASE Bestows Award on a GW Professor for the Sixth Time

By Zak M. Salih

Elizabeth Chacko, associate professor of geography and international affairs, has teaching in her blood. All the women in her family are teachers, and from an early age Chacko tutored neighborhood kids in her native India.

In recognition of Chacko’s teaching excellence, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) recently named her the 2006 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching District of Columbia Professor of the Year. Chacko was selected from a pool of 300 professors, marking the second consecutive year and sixth time overall that a GW faculty member has won the award. 

After earning her Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998, the opportunity to teach at GW lured Chacko from thoughts of working for a non-governmental organization (NGO). Chacko’s academic interests include the distinctive spatial patterns of disease, health status and health care, and the factors that produce these configurations; as well as the effects of socioeconomic status, gender, race, and ethnicity on the transformation of urban space in the United States.

She has taught courses in population geography, regional development, medical geography, and on South Asia, and currently serves as the interim chair of the Department of Geography and program director of the Dean’s Scholars in Globalization.

The CASE Professor of the Year Program honors faculty members’ dedication to and impact on undergraduate students. Chacko’s teaching methods center on creating dialogue between teacher and student, actively engaging the student in the learning process.

“In lieu of lecturing, I ask the students to complete their reading so that we can discuss the salient issues in class,” she says. “I hope to help students take responsibility for exploring, engaging, and learning the concepts in these readings, while I play the role of critical questioner.” Chacko believes this method fosters “co-inquiry” both between students and between teacher and student.

“You have to have that connection to your class,” she says. “They are teaching me just as much as I am teaching them.”

Her interest in both geography and teaching is readily evident. “Like most professors, I feel very passionate about my discipline,” she says. “I try to convey that sense of awe, wonder, and excitement about what we’re studying.”
Chacko’s plans this spring include a sabbatical to conduct research on the return migration of highly skilled professionals and their impact on high-tech cities in India, and the role of immigrants and transnationalism in developing countries such as India and Ethiopia.


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