While all of Lauri Mattenson’s teaching revolves around writing, her courses cover a wide array of applications and contexts. In the English composition classes she teaches regularly, she might build lessons around stand-up comedy as public pedagogy and free speech on campus. In other courses, she’ll dive into topics like career readiness and public speaking.
“I am always asking students, ‘Why does this matter,’ and ‘What’s at stake?’” said Mattenson, a senior continuing lecturer in UCLA Writing Programs. “I encourage students to consider how ideas, concepts and theories apply to our behaviors and real choices.”
Mattenson said she is continually inspired by the knowledge that students want their education to “mean something.” But it’s Mattenson’s ability to inspire her students, among other factors, that has earned her a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2026. She is one of just 12 UCLA faculty members to be recognized this year, along with six teaching assistants.
Mattenson called the award “a deeply meaningful acknowledgment” and said she “might have shed a tear or two” upon learning of the honor — an understandable reaction for someone who said she has known since childhood that she wanted to be a teacher.
“I’ve always felt that teaching is the most hopeful profession,” she said. “If you’re going to do it, you have to believe that change is possible — individually, but also on a social level and a political level. And I need to be working in a field that feels like we’re working toward a healthier, more equitable world.”
Mattenson said one of the fundamental principles of her teaching is embodied cognition.
“We need to understand that learning is not just filling the mind and ignoring the body,” she said. “Students are often told before they get to college that you just have to memorize a lot of things and repeat them back for exams. But I really want them to understand that learning helps you embody the kind of person you want to be — and that ideas are not just inert abstractions, but living forces that shape how we exist in the world.”
If that sounds like a lofty challenge, it’s one that her students appreciate.
“Lauri inspired my peers and me to discuss important and personal topics without pressuring us, thanks to her mastery of creating an environment of engagement without judgment,” said Siena Bertacco, who took Mattenson’s BodyMind Literacy honors collegium during spring quarter 2025 and graduated from UCLA this month. “She motivated us to apply theories and ideas learned in class to our lives and helped us understand the preconceptions we harbor about bodies, disabilities, health and identities, as well as the fact that school systems have not been designed to accommodate and manage diverse bodies.”
To that end, Mattenson’s teaching draws freely from disability studies.
“I feel like we all have a lot to learn from disability studies because they help us understand multiple and diverse ways of participating,” she said.
Bertacco, a physiological science major and disability studies minor, said that approach was especially meaningful to her during the BodyMind course because it offered lessons she will carry with her as she pursues a career in medicine — a remarkable takeaway from a writing class.
“Her course opened my eyes to several aspects of delivering quality patient care,” Bertacco said. “By teaching me to look beyond diagnosis and treatment, Lauri inspired me to consider other factors, such as social or environmental barriers that can negatively impact one’s health, and how an individual can better care for themselves to ease some of the discomfort induced by the systems around us.”
Mattenson’s dedication to lifting up her students extends well beyond the UCLA campus. Since 2016, she has taught through the UCLA Prison Education Program, leading writing and public speaking classes for people who are incarcerated.
“I believe that anybody who wants education should have access to education, so joining that program was an immediate yes for me,” she said. “I just love teaching those classes.”
Mattenson and her fellow honorees will be recognized at UCLA’s Andrea L. Rich Night to Honor Teaching during the fall quarter. Reflecting the breadth of outstanding educators across Writing Programs, she is the fifth WP lecturer to be receive a Distinguished Teaching Award this decade, joining Margaret Davis (2020), Tara Prescott-Johnson (2022), Laurel Westrup (2023) and Tamar Christensen (2025).