Excellence in Instruction Award for Lecturers: Olga Lyanda-Geller

Note: The profile below is part of Purdue Today's ongoing series on Purdue's winners of the 2020 Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in Memory of Charles B. Murphy, Exceptional Early Career Award and Excellence in Instruction Award for Lecturers.

For Olga Lyanda-Geller, a senior lecturer for the School of Language and Cultures and a recipient of the Excellence in Instruction Award for Lecturers, an instructor’s role is to encourage students to find their own way in the process of self-making.

“No matter how many students I have in class, I aim at making every student feel individually and uniquely taught,” she says. “For me, the most interesting part is getting acquainted with my students: each has a different cultural background, a different mode of thought, and a very different personality.”

Lyanda-Geller receives praise from students for both her engaging style of teaching and her extensive knowledge of the Russian language and culture. Some students credit her for their interest in Russian as a major.

“Olga is without a doubt the best professor I’ve ever had,” a student says. “She shows a passion for language and instills it in the students. She understands the difficulty of learning foreign languages, and helps in the areas exactly needed. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have the love for class as I do.”

Students are inspired by her teaching, and she is just as influenced by her students. Lyanda-Geller finds that working with her students in class and beyond inspires her own research, particularly on symbols in philosophy of language and culture.

Teaching beginner’s courses are especially rewarding, Lyanda-Geller says, because she gets to see new students who are interested in learning a language and the culture behind it. However, she also enjoys teaching upper-level classes to see the progress of her students.

First arriving at Purdue as a PhD student in philosophy, Lyanda-Geller became a continuing lecturer for the Department of German and Russian in 2012; she became a senior lecturer in 2019. Before earning her doctoral degree at Purdue, she received graduate degrees at universities in Samara, Russia, and Paris-Sorbonne, France.

“Having learned from brilliant teachers from different countries, languages and styles, I appreciate the old wisdom, ‘One should choose oneself a teacher and a friend,’” she says. “I hope to transfer to my students what I learned from my teachers.”

Outside of Russian courses, Lyanda-Geller also teaches French and philosophy and is affiliated with the Jewish Studies Program. Since her time as an instructor at the University, she has taught more than 20 different courses and more than 60 sections.

“I love trying new things and I’m always open to new experiences,” Lyanda-Geller says. “Designing a new course for me is like writing a new research paper: you have to conduct a lot of studies and think of how to present your results in a meaningful, effective and engaging form.”

Aside from teaching regular courses and designing new courses, Lyanda-Geller enjoys working with students, individually supervising and mentoring their academic and research projects, a number of which have resulted in conference presentations and publications.

Though the coronavirus outbreak has temporarily moved all classes online, Lyanda-Geller stays connected with her students through small group discussions and individual meetings via Blackboard Learner and WebEx.

She has also contributed to an online teaching workshop to help other professors in the SLC community with little or no experience in teaching remotely. In particular, she has offered advice to her colleagues in the form of crash-course and individual consultations.

“For many years, I was part of STARTALK online language workshops where I first learned, and then taught others how to use technology productively and creatively. This experience has proven extremely useful nowadays,” she says.

In addition to the current award, Lyanda-Geller received several Outstanding Continuing Lecturer awards from the School of Languages and Cultures throughout the years.

“The overall goal of education, as I see it, is to help students look into themselves, broaden their horizon and shape out their personality through transmitting cultural experience,” Lyanda-Geller says. “Learning another language and culture gives each student an opportunity to develop and express his or her individual potential in yet another way.”

Writer: Jackie Le