Media Contact
Kenya King
Director
Public Relations and Marketing Communications
Perimeter College
[email protected]
COVINGTON, Ga.—It’s all about creating civic-minded citizens.
In her political science courses, Barbara Robertson helps her students understand how their studies connect to both the present and the past, through their involvement as local government poll workers, to understanding the U.S. Constitution to exploring the nation’s capitol.
The 2024 Teaching Excellence Award winner takes her own passion for civic engagement and energizes her students to get involved in their communities.
Robertson fell in love with American government as a high school student traveling with her family to Washington, D.C. “I loved it. I asked my family if I could go to Washington as my high school senior gift. I had fallen in love with history.”
As an instructor on the Newton Campus, she wants her students to feel that same excitement about learning about government that she experienced as a teen.
“I’m most passionate about teaching students to care about their government and issues around them and to understand so they are informed, citizens, she said.
In 2022 she received a Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Online Education (CETLOE) mini-grant to develop Georgia State’s first ‘study away’ program to Washington, D.C. The Signature Experience program launched during Maymester 2023.
Accompanied by Robertson and Newton History associate professor Dr. Joe Bagley, students visited the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veterans Memorial and museums, among other sites; they also met U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff and representatives with House member Mike Collins’ office and spoke with Library of Congress archivists. The highlight of the trip was watching votes take place on the both the House and Senate floors,” she said. Coursework in Honors political science was covered during the trip.
“I had it in my head that I wanted to do this for years,” she said. “I knew that so many things in Washington were free—the museums, visiting the Capitol and the White House,” she said. “When I took our students to D.C. it takes their course out of the abstract and they start paying more attention to what they’re learning. “
Robertson noted that while the university has multiple study abroad opportunities the idea of a ‘study away’ program didn’t exist. “I had to be creative to fund a site visit,” she said. She also has worked with development to receive funding to help reduce the overall cost for her students for the trip. In May, she’ll take another group to D.C. with Bagley.
Over the years at Perimeter College, she has become the go-to faculty member organizing and expanding Constitution Day activities to include a week of programming, including coordinating voting registration and bringing speakers and U.S. legislators like Hank Johnson to campus.
While she originally thought she would have a career in international affairs, teaching became her passion.
Robertson double-majored in history and political science at Georgia Southern University and did her graduate work in international studies at the University of Georgia. She originally wanted to work in international affairs and policy and has a background studying the Middle East. “I wanted to work in D.C. in international affairs,” she said.
As a graduate student, she fell in love with teaching and eventually realized that was the path she wanted to take. “When I finished my teaching assistant job at UGA I cried all the way home. I knew I enjoyed teaching and I felt like I was pretty good at it. I had always wanted to help people, and found I was doing that with students.”
She got her first job teaching as a part-time instructor at Gwinnett Tech and developed that institution’s political science and American Government program, before coming to Perimeter College in 2012.
Since that time, she’s garnered other awards for her teaching: in 2023, she received the Portnoy Prize, the college’s top award for Honors faculty; in 2020 she received the college-wide Junior Faculty award and in 2019 she was named a University System of Georgia Governor’s Teaching Fellow. Robertson also has been recognized by her colleagues state-wide—receiving the Georgia Political Science Association’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2014 and 2015.