Awards

Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award - 2024

About Theresa Ochoa

Professor Teresa Ochoa is an exceptional instructor strongly committed to including and integrating civic engagement in the classroom. She began as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the School of Education in 2000 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. She has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara in Fall 2006 and a Visiting Scholar at Leiden University, Netherlands in Spring 2008. In 2019, Ochoa was recognized for excellence in teaching by the Board of Trustees. She currently serves as a professor at IU Bloomington and as the Executive Director of the Global Institute on Juvenile Delinquency & Prevention at IU Kokomo.

Professor Ochoa’s philosophy of providing real-world community and service-learning experiences for her students led to her developing and founding the Helping Offenders Prosper through Employment (HOPE) initiative. This program brings together majors from various disciplines to serve as mentors to incarcerated juveniles. The mentors are responsible for developing the employment, communication, and interview skills of incarcerated juveniles and providing academic support. This program, a staple example of civic stewardship, has been adopted by the Indiana Department of Corrections as a statewide mentoring program for all state-level juvenile facilities. It plays an important role in reducing recidivism for juvenile offenders, and Professor Ochoa is currently working to expand the success of this program internationally, with partnerships in Costa Rica and Mexico.

Professor Ochoa has also played an important role providing her students research and publication opportunities, launching the journal Law & Disorder in 2006, which allows undergraduate students to publish manuscripts on specific issues concerning learners with exceptionalities and the laws that govern them. To put it simply, Professor Ochoa is an excellent researcher, instructor, and innovator, who has created unique unparalleled opportunities for students that have awakened their sense of civic duty at Indiana University.