Dr. Nancy Kepple awarded 2023 Gene A. and Gretchen Budig Award for Excellence in Teaching

Mon, 05/22/23

The KU School of Social Welfare is pleased to announce the 2022-2023 Gene A. and Gretchen Budig Award for Excellence in Teaching. In recognition of contributions to students and the teaching mission in the KU School of Social Welfare, Dr. Nancy Kepple is honored with the Budig Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dr. Nancy Kepple’s teaching is dynamic in all senses of the word. She continually evaluates her instructional practices, experiments with different pedagogies, and self-assesses the spaces she creates and the roles she plays—in the classroom and beyond. While the how and what of Dr. Kepple’s teaching have changed considerably in the eight years since she joined our faculty, her teaching remains focused on the most important why: supporting students in developing, integrating, and applying the critical thinking, emotional insight, and creative problem-solving that collectively contribute to stellar social work practice.

In addition to her teaching within specific social work classes at all levels, Nancy brings her values, skills, and sophisticated knowledge to advising and mentoring students across levels of education. In her tenure at the School, she has been

co-director of the KUSSW Multicultural Scholars Program,
research mentor to undergraduate students in the KU-Haskell Bridge Program and McNair Scholars,
and mentor to doctoral students both within and outside the School.

Dr. Kepple also provides leadership to further the School’s educational mission. She serves as MSW Program Director and recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Teaching in Social Work titled, Maintaining the magic: Adapting practice pedagogies across course modalities. >

We appreciate Dr. Kepple’s contributions these past 8 years and are grateful to have her guidance in important curricular reforms and their implementation today. Even more importantly, we know that social work clients of the future will appreciate the imprint Dr. Kepple’s teaching has on the profession, which is of course the why that matters most.