UNM-Gallup instructor Tracy Lassiter earns teaching excellence award

Tracy Lassiter’s work at UNM-Gallup drew systemwide attention this spring when she received the University of New Mexico Teaching Excellence Award for Reflection and Continuous Improvement in Albuquerque. Lassiter, an associate professor and coordinator of digital learning at UNM-Gallup, was one of 22 educators honored April 8 during the annual Teaching Excellence Awards, part of the Spring Teaching Conference held April 8-9.

The award recognizes educators who show intentional, ongoing reflection on their teaching and its effect on student learning. UNM’s Center for Teaching and Learning said the 2026 version of the award was built around principles and aligned with the UNM Framework for Teaching and Learning Success, with the goal of recognizing faculty across campuses and contract types.

For McKinley County, the recognition lands in a place where UNM-Gallup carries outsized weight. The campus, founded in 1968, describes itself as a two-year branch of the University of New Mexico and the largest of UNM’s four branch campuses serving Gallup and the wider region. Its mission is to help people reach educational and professional goals while respecting the traditions and values of the communities it serves.

Lassiter has built her teaching around that local mission. In a 2025 UNM-Gallup profile, she described student projects that connect writing to Gallup’s culture and history, including work that sends students to Zollinger Library, local sites and interviews with community members such as trading post owners and weavers. Some of that work has been used to add context at the George Galanis Multicultural Center’s Storyteller Museum or for outreach, giving students a direct link between classroom writing and the community around them.

That approach matters at a branch campus where students often need instruction that is responsive, personal and adaptable. Lassiter said the recognition meant a great deal because it acknowledged the demanding, ongoing work that comes with trauma-informed teaching and with serving students at branch campuses. The award, in her view, reflects the labor behind continually improving instruction instead of treating teaching as a fixed skill.

Interim Chancellor John Zimmerman, then dean of instruction, presented the award and said UNM-Gallup was proud of Lassiter’s accomplishment. He called it a testament to her continuing development as an educator and to the work involved in her pedagogy.

Lassiter’s background helps explain the range she brings to the classroom. Before entering academia, she worked as an overseas development worker, a sports writer and a Capitol Hill reporter. Her academic training includes a PhD in English literature and criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in comparative literature from Indiana University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University. She had already earned UNM’s 2020-21 Branch Campus Tenure-Track Teacher of the Year honor and a Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award in September 2021.