HOLLAND - Dr. Donald Cronkite, professor of biology at Hope College, has been named the state's 2005 "College Teacher of the Year" by the Michigan Science Teachers Association (MSTA).

The Friday, March 4, awards ceremony during which he and winners in other categories will be recognized will carry added significance. This year's "High School Teacher of the Year" will be 1994 Hope graduate Angelique Biehl, who as a student was in two of his classes and now teaches at Portage Northern High School.

The awards will be presented during the MSTA's 52nd annual conference, being held at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center. The conference will run Thursday-Saturday, March 3-5, featuring the theme "Science is Elemental."

Known for his imaginative approach to his discipline, Cronkite has also been invited to present a seminar on "The Role of the Zany in Teaching." In his own classroom, for example, he has had his students design costumes that illustrated the features that distinguished one of the phyla they studied, and has had them perform a square dance to demonstrate the principle of cell-division. For a biology "question and answer" column that he established for students seeking help, he adopted the egret image on the introductory text's cover as the mascot and had the bird present the answers in the first person.

It is not the first time that Cronkite, a member of the Hope faculty since 1978, has received major external recognition for teaching excellence. In 1995, he won the "Four-Year College Biology Teaching Award" presented by the National Association of Biology Teachers. In 1991, he was one of only 700 faculty members recognized nationally with a 1990-91 Sears-Roebuck Foundation Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award. He has also received recognition from the campus community. In 1988, he was named a co-recipient of the college's Hope Outstanding Professor Educator (H.O.P.E.) Award by the senior class and served as Commencement speaker.

Cronkite is a specialist in genetics. His teaching interests include introductory biology, embryology, cell biology, genetics, the history of biology, evolutionary biology, and science and human values.

His publications include "A Problem-Based Guide to Basic Genetics," currently in its fourth edition. He is currently a member of a multidisciplinary committee formed by the National Council of Churches to lead the U.S. ecumenical community's work over the next two years on issues of human genetic technology. For several years, he was moderator of the Christian Action Commission of the Reformed Church in America, the college's parent denomination.

Cronkite was academic director for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation National Leadership Institutes for High School Biology Teachers from 1991 to 1997, and has been a science curriculum consultant to 21 different colleges. With help from the National Science Foundation, he has been involved in forming high school-college partnerships to enhance science education at the secondary level. He has been active on campus in presenting workshops for his colleagues concerning the appropriate use of technology in teaching.

He also directed pre-college outreach programs at Hope which were funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, including a sixth/seventh-grade science recreation program, a seventh/eighth-grade science demonstrators program and a ninth/10th-grade research club.

Cronkite has also held visiting research appointments at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Maryland, the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. Prior to joining the Hope faculty, he taught at the University of Redlands in California.

He holds his bachelor's degree and his doctorate, both in zoology, from Indiana University at Bloomington.

The MSTA was founded in 1953, and works to promote the development and advancement of science education in Michigan. Membership is open to all who are interested in the advancement of science education in Michigan, and includes elementary, middle school, junior and senior high school teachers of science, college-level instructors and science education administrators, and suppliers of science books and apparatus.

In addition to the college teacher and high school teacher awards, during the event MSTA will also honor a "Teacher of Promise," teachers of the year at the elementary and middle school level, and an administrator of the year.

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