Until suffering a shoulder injury, Andrew Pennock enjoyed playing disc golf, a sport that demands creativity.
“It’s incredibly athletic,” he said. “Somebody throwing a football can only throw it harder or higher. Those are their only choices. But with disc golf, there’s a backhand, a flick and an overhand. There are three different ways to throw it. Each of them has a different angle and will land at a different moment. It’s just a beautiful, cerebral game.”
Pennock, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, brings this versatile approach to his teaching as well.
Pennock, who has taught for around 20 years – including 11 at UVA – uses experiential learning in his courses, such as his Virginia politics course on gubernatorial transitions.
“We met with people who had run the previous transitions,” Pennock said. “We went to Richmond. We had officials come to the Grounds. We looked at different documents, and then the students produced briefing documents as if they worked for the transition teams. The students really had a sense of, ‘This is a real work product that we do in the real world.’”
Pennock says former students who share how they apply his lessons in their work encourage him as a teacher. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
The students in his master’s capstone class have worked with real-world clients, including a state senator, a nonprofit leader, and a federal agency head, and “they are producing documents that help those decision-makers make decisions,” he said.
“These instructional strategies motivate students to learn,” Pennock said. “Reading the manual for running a nuclear reactor is probably the most boring thing in the world. Unless you’re inside a nuclear reactor, and then it’s the most riveting thing you’ve ever read. If you can have students see the experiential value of the classroom work that they’re doing, then students are self-motivated to do the work.”
Pennock is one of the most recent recipients of the University Teaching Award, an honor given to faculty members who distinguish themselves both in the classroom and in their fields. Aside from his teaching duties, he serves as the faculty director of the Batten School’s Master of Public Policy orientation program, has served on the Batten School’s curriculum committee and is an elected member of the Faculty Senate’s Executive Council. His academic research examines public policy in the global economy and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Pennock is still enthusiastic about teaching. “I love the engagement with the students,” he said, “I love ideas. I love preparing people to think about the world in more complex ways. I love developing people. My classes are not meant to keep a student in the same form that they arrived. They’re meant to be transformational. You should leave my class a different kind of person than you were before you showed up. And part of that is you have a different set of skills, but part of it is you should care more deeply.”
Pennock said he wants his “students to be able to see the world more clearly, so that they can have more curiosity and compassion about the people that they’re trying to help in the policy world.”
Pennock views himself as “someone who draws out and equips people from the things that they already know.”
