In earning Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s 2025 Teaching Excellence Award for non-tenure track faculty, Christopher Chiasson is quick to emphasize that he didn’t win the honor on his own.
En route to becoming an educator, Chiasson, an assistant professor of practice of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, credits the many instructors and students he has had in his career “to become a decent and hopefully still improving teacher.”
“I am humbled, because I know that there are many excellent teachers at SIU,” Chiasson said. “I am also grateful to my students and colleagues, and thankful to have had many great teachers over the years from whom I have gradually learned how to become a better teacher,” he said. “It also inspires me to try harder next year, because now I need to prove that I’ve earned it.”
The award recognizes faculty who demonstrate outstanding teaching, high-quality classroom performance, innovation and “commitment to student learning outcomes and inclusive excellence in education.”
In nominating Chiasson, Mary A. Bricker, an associate professor of German and languages, cultures, and international studies program coordinator in the School of Languages and Linguistics, wrote that Chiasson designed a German study-abroad program, and during spring break the past two years, he has taken students on a faculty-led course on the history and culture of the German Rhineland. The successful program “filled a decades-long void to take our students abroad to a German-speaking country,” she wrote.
Bricker added that Chiasson keeps students engaged in group discussions throughout his classes and routinely offers culture courses taught in English translation. He received the College of Liberal Arts’ Outstanding Teacher Award for non-tenure track faculty in 2024 and is “always striving toward supporting the German section’s goal of offering the highest quality education to our Liedloff scholars as some of the best undergraduate German students” in the state, Bricker said.
Chiasson started at SIU Carbondale in 2020 and held his initial classes remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chiasson said he tries to be an effective teacher by following models that his mentors set.
“To paraphrase both my undergraduate and graduate advisers, in the humanities, our fields are defined as much by fundamental debates — whether about values or interpretative rules — as by facts,” he said.
Chiasson said he’s upfront with his students about the need to master facts, not for their own sake but so they can weigh in on fundamental debates.
“I structure my classes so that students learn the basics and get oriented first, and then I present them with one or more of the debates that perennially perplex and divide the experts,” he said. “The point is that once they have mastered the material, they can articulate arguments that experts have to take seriously. I think that that order of education — learning the facts, constructing persuasive arguments and getting used to the idea that you will be taken as seriously as you deserve to be — is valuable training for any career and life in general.”
Chiasson came to SIU Carbondale from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a visiting scholar in German. He also taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Indiana University Bloomington before coming to SIU. He earned his doctorate and master’s degrees in modern German literature and culture from Indiana University.
Get to know CHRISTOPHER CHIASSON
Name: Christopher Chiasson
Department and job title: assistant professor of practice, German, School of Languages and Linguistics.
Years at SIU Carbondale: 5
Give us the elevator pitch for your job.
My teaching is split between classes in German and English-language classes such as Norse myth and fairy tales. In the English-language classes, I provide cultural background, demonstrate standard reading practices and explicate major interpretative schools of thought. In my German-language classes, I find interesting German cultural artifacts and give students the tools they need to discuss them in detail and reflect on how and why they differ from American cultural artifacts.
What is your favorite part of the job?
My favorite part of the job is talking to students, whether about useful things such as essay preparations or career options, or topically relevant things such as what the Marvelverse did to Thor or how German history appears in the TV show “Dark,” or seemingly useless and irrelevant things such as a ranking of Lady Gaga’s albums or the best movies of the 1980s. (Both extremely useful and relevant topics, to be clear, only seeminglynot so.)
Why did you choose SIU?
SIU offered me the chance to teach a wide variety of classes and the opportunity to develop a study abroad program with the support of my colleagues in the School of Languages and Linguistics. I have stayed because I appreciate the students, who are often good-naturedly skeptical of the things I say but always willing to hear me out.
I’m happiest when I am…
Eating or drinking chocolate with other people and tricking them into discussing flavor notes with me. The students who have gone on my study abroad trips can readily attest to this unfortunate character trait, as they have been (long-suffering) good sports about it.
If I could be someone else for a day, it would be…
British comedian James Acaster. His four-part special “Repertoire” is the most narratively intricate stand-up I have ever seen, and I’d just like to know what it’s like to see the world that way and be smart enough to put something like that together.
What is your favorite song? Why do you like it?
My favorite song is impossible to pin down — but a criminally under-heard recent song is Chloe Echo’s “The Door,” a funny story about a terrible roommate. My favorite album is more stable: Aimee Mann’s “Lost in Space,” which is the aural equivalent of watching a rainstorm through a window while drinking tea on a Sunday afternoon. It is emotionally intelligent and even mordantly wise, but still quite raw — like a more mature version of Chris Isaak’s “Forever Blue.” The attention to detail, both musically and lyrically, is also breathtaking.
(Editor’s note: Chiasson’s last name is pronounced CHASE-un.)
