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Piet Koene, Spanish
2004 Iowa Professor of the Year
When Piet Koene was named the Iowa Professor of the Year in 2004, it was the first time the title had been awarded to a professor from a college in the western half of the state. It was also just Koene’s fifth year as a college professor.
Hired to teach Spanish at Northwestern in 2000, Koene quickly proved himself to be a great teacher. His classes filled up early, the number of Spanish majors tripled to nearly 50 students in five years, and in 2003 he received the college’s Teaching Excellence Award.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching took note and selected him as one of 47 state winners—along with four national winners—in its U.S. Professors of the Year program. One of the most prestigious awards honoring professors, the program recognizes outstanding undergraduate teaching.
Koene was born in Canada to a Dutch immigrant family. Although he now holds a master’s degree in Latin American history from the University of Toronto, he’s quick to point out he didn’t know any Spanish before he was 16.
As a high school senior, however, he spent a year in Honduras with his missionary sister and fell in love with the language, Hispanic culture, and a girl named Rosa.
Rosa is now his wife, and their family, which speaks only Spanish at home, is involved in his teaching. Once a week, students who live in the college’s Spanish House share a meal with Koene, Rosa and their sons.
“I cannot just lecture, and students cannot just absorb it,” he says of teaching Spanish. “They have to learn to use the language—to use the material and practice it in very concrete ways.”
Koene provides plenty of opportunities to get that practice. He is known for assigning activities that require his students to interact with Spanish-speaking people in the community. Often that interaction is in the form of service: teaching English as a second language or working with youth at Amistad Cristiana, a Hispanic church he and his family attend in Sioux Center, Iowa.
“He doesn’t just talk about the importance of knowing a language in order to love our neighbor better; he creates opportunities for us to actually do it,” says former student Jessica Mueller, who spent a year in Costa Rica after she graduated from NWC.
“He focuses special attention on the difficulties of Hispanics locally, in the U.S. in general, and in Latin America,” she says. “You can’t come away from his classes without having to struggle with issues of social justice and our responsibility as Christians.”
Koene helped organize monthly Spanish chapels at Northwestern and serves as an adviser to the Spanish Club. He has led study trips to Mexico and Spring Service Projects to Honduras. He also serves as a translator in the community, and when he works on a court case, has his students attend the trial to see the need for—and importance of—accurate interpretation.
“I want students to see how Spanish can be used and what it feels like to be completely dependent linguistically on someone else,” he says.
In 2006 Koene passed the exams to become a certified court interpreter for the state of Iowa—at the time, making him one of only nine Spanish interpreters in the top tier of the state’s professional legal interpreters.
Whether interpreting or teaching, for Koene, speaking Spanish is a way to answer God’s call.
“With ability in another language, we can better serve others,” he says, “be it immigrants in our home—or when we serve in other countries and are in their homes.”
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