MWSU associate professor receives Governor’s Award

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (News-Press NOW) -- One Missouri Western State University associate professor is a recipient of the Missouri Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Evan Elizabeth Hart is an associate professor of history at MWSU.

Hart has been with the university since 2017, teaching general studies history as well as more specialized upper-division courses.

The Governor's Award is sponsored by the Missouri Council on Public Higher Education and will be presented in Jefferson City.

“MO West is fortunate to have such a compassionate and creative leader as Dr. Hart,” said Dr. Elizabeth Kennedy, Missouri Western’s president. “Furthering our state-appointed applied learning mission, she provides unique learning opportunities outside of the classroom, including museum and cemetery tours, and alternative assignments that tap into students’ strengths in producing scholarly research projects. And she is beloved by her students.”

Hart views the teaching of history as “helping students understand how we arrived here, wherever ‘here’ is. What happened in the past continues to impact who we are.”

She believes history goes beyond memorizing names and dates.

“We try to answer the hows and whys, and to humanize the past,” she said. “I’m a social historian, so I’m really interested in history from the ‘bottom-up’ – how did everyday people experience the world around them?”

To help her students develop critical thinking skills, she makes sure they engage with historical sources deeper than surface level.

“These sources are making arguments,” said Hart. “What are they trying to convince you of, and how? What can we read between the lines, and how can we connect all of the pieces together? And they can ask the same questions of current sources, approaching news stories and speeches the way they do historical documents.”

Hart received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Indiana, and both her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Cincinnati.

She previously taught as a visiting professor at the University of Florida, and as adjunct faculty at the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University.