Commencement 2023: Teaching Excellence Award, Nikki Mantyla

In class, Nikki Mantyla often displays students’ sentences on a screen and invites everyone to shift around words and punctuation. She wants to disarm students who may fear writing and perceive it as rigid. She shows them how the arrangement of words can be played with to create different emphases.

“I find the best learning happens through curiosity, experimentation, discussion, questioning and simply playing around,” says Nikki, who teaches general education and novel writing classes. “I want students to discover the many methods of giving life to the words on the page.”

In her 15 years of teaching at SLCC, Nikki has heard many students say they hated writing until they took one of her classes. She recalls one student who said for the first time ever he felt his voice as a writer was worthwhile and he could use it to speak up and out.

Teaching is part of Nikki’s heritage. Her grandparents and parents were teachers, and she has always loved the challenge in teaching others. She earned both her bachelor’s degree in English Teaching and master’s degree in English with a creative-writing emphasis at Brigham Young University.

“I want all my students to walk into the world confident and able to engage in whatever way they will need to through writing.”

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