Three Fowler Faculty Members Honored with 2025 Teaching Excellence Awards

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Three members of the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University were named as recipients of the 2025 Teaching Excellence Awards by the college’s Faculty Development Committee. This year’s honorees are Dwarka Chakravarty (associate professor of management), Dan Eaton (management lecturer), and Amanda Marino (assistant professor of accounting).

The three awardees shared some of their teaching methods with their colleagues during a teaching colloquium held on February 20.

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Dwarka Chakravarty: “Learning should be fun, but it shouldn’t be easy,” said Chakravarty during his presentation. “It should be challenging and relevant.” 

To create an engaging classroom environment, Chakravarty relies on a variety of instructional tools to reinforce key concepts including video clips, games, whiteboards, DocCam, and frequently uses humor (often poking fun at himself). He integrates current business trends into discussions and challenges naive assumptions. For instance, asking whether AI is an industry pushes students beyond simplistic mental models and towards understanding ecosystems versus industries. 

Chakravarty also stressed the need to be organized and responsive (for example, grading and returning exams quickly), and to respect and acknowledge students’ individuality, which starts with knowing and addressing them by their preferred names. 

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Dan Eaton: Like Chakravarty, Eaton said he also tries to use humor in his lessons and tries to learn the names of each of his students. He said he does this by:

• looking at their names on the roster and on submitted test forms
• associating the name with someone or something familiar to him, and
• reinforcing his memory of challenging names by calling on those students shortly after calling on them the first time.

In addition to calling on his students by name, Eaton discussed how he uses a system of points and penalties to engage them and to encourage attendance. He also uses actual, not hypothetical, business scenarios to make lessons more relatable.

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Amanda Marino: Marino takes learning her students’ names as seriously as Eaton and Chakravarty, and even learns their preferred nicknames as well as their personal career goals.

“Being able to communicate with students is critical,” said Marino, who said she likes to keep her lessons in line with the accounting/tax profession by using guest speakers, staying up-to-date with ever-changing tax rules, integrating artificial intelligence into accounting systems, and aligning her lessons with the students’ career objectives.

Marino said her three guiding principles are “be a lifelong student, make your teaching personal and relevant, and always be your authentic self.”