First Committment-to-Diversity Alumni Awards
The College of Education recognized the contributions of Beth Fettweis (MAT ’02) and Stacey (King) Medd (BA ‘88/MA ’02) with its first-ever Commitment-to-Diversity Alumni Awards. Both are graduates of the Teacher Education program and teach in the Iowa City Community School District.
Medd Helps Her Students Find Their Voice 
During her 20-year career as an ESL teacher in West Liberty and in Iowa City, and as a fifth-grade teacher in Clinton and a second-grade teacher in Iowa City, Stacey (King) Medd has won awards for herself and her students, initiated a study group called Escuela Familia for bilingual families that included a summer day camp, led her students from all over the world to teach their peers through annual International Nights, and published accounts of her thoughtful teacher research.
But these accomplishments, as stellar as they are, are not the reason she was recognized. As Professor Kathy Whitmore said, “It is because of the hundreds, if not thousands, or even millions of special moments in Stacey’s teaching career.”
Examples include the time she helped seven-year-old Enrique from Mexico find his voice—not as a struggling writer hunting for words in a new language, but as an imaginative astronaut who wanted to “get one hundred stars that would float up to their mama.”
Or when she discovered second grader Johan from Colombia’s passion for fishing and created an in-depth study of fishing that concluded with a day-long real fishing trip with Stacey’s father that changed all her students’ definitions of school and learning.
Or when she earned trust so dearly that fifth grader Tomasita felt safe to write about her perilous emigration story, in which she left her mother on one side of the Rio Grande River and became the primary homemaker for her brother and father as well as an elementary student in Stacey’s classroom.
Or when she took time on one of her numerous evening visits to her students’ neighborhood to tour 10-year-old Beth from Venezuela’s bedroom. In this moment empty walls became a theater where shadows dance, sing, and play and an old night light became a really good friend that comforts in the night.
Medd says she recognizes her students, many of whom come from cultures, languages, and experiences that are marginalized by U.S. public education, as the “multidimensional people that they are.”
Medd soaks in the language of her students’ anxieties, fears, demands, and dreams and invites them to find their voices in her classroom.
Fettweis’ Personal Sacrifice Brings English Education a Great Teacher
Professor Bonnie Sunstein had heard about graduate student Beth Fettweis from students and colleagues.
“She was a rare liberal arts UI Presidential Scholar working on her Ph.D. in the English Department, and a star teacher in our General Education Literacy program,” Sunstein said.
But Fettweis discovered the more she studied and wrote about the tiny scholarly details of someone in a piece of literature from a particular time period, the more she realized how much she’d rather be teaching.
Fettweis had to give up the prestigious five-year presidential fellowship when she transferred to the MAT in English Education program. Since then, Sunstein has had the privilege and pleasure to see Fettweis in her classroom at City High School, standing at the door every morning, greeting each of her students separately and differently—remembering the details of their reading, their writing, their lives.
“I’ve listened to local parents as they brag about their high schooler’s English teacher who’s changed the way they think,” Sunstein said. “I’ve had the good luck of being able to count on Beth to work with our student teachers, to hear them astonished over and over again, as she mentors them as they learn how to mentor her students, always offering clear, clean, smart, passionate insights.”
