Learning to teach, teaching to learn

Lawrence Fellows experience liberal education at its best

By Steven Blodgett

Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2005

John Cotton Dana, noted American library innovator and namesake of the Rutgers University Dana Library, once proclaimed, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” As the new academic year begins, eight recent Ph.D.s have arrived at Lawrence to do just that — to continue their advanced education by learning how to become great teachers in the liberal learning tradition.

Under the auspices of the Lawrence Fellows in the Liberal Arts and Sciences program, these young scholars will be spending the next two years honing their existing teaching skills and discovering what makes a Lawrence education truly distinctive. The eight fellows were selected from a pool of over 240 applicants who completed their doctorates at top-ranked research institutions in the U.S., as well as Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. All have had previous teaching experience at the university level.

The purposes of the new postdoctoral teaching fellowship program are twofold:

• To help develop the professoriate of the future by providing recent Ph.D.s with mentoring, expanded opportunities to teach talented undergraduates, and research collaborations that will better prepare them for careers at selective liberal arts colleges.

• To bring young scholars to campus who will enrich student learning, share new research directions being pursued at distinguished graduate programs, and further strengthen the ability of the college to offer one-on-one learning experiences for all Lawrence students.

The need
“There is a critical need in higher education to work toward better preparation of the next generation of academics for careers as faculty members,” says President Jill Beck. “Liberal arts colleges have a unique contribution to make in that regard and have, I believe, a responsibility to share with young scholars what are widely seen as some of the best practices in undergraduate education.”

The disconnect between the completion of advanced graduate study — which is often quite narrow in focus and heavily research-oriented — and the requirements of college teaching, especially at the undergraduate level, has long been a concern within higher education.

Newly minted Ph.D.s often enter the college job market with relatively little exposure to the breadth of perspective and engagement that are characteristic of successful undergraduate teaching within a liberal education curriculum. Junior faculty are called upon to learn the art of effective teaching as they go, often with only limited guidance. Placed in a sink-or-swim situation, those fortunate enough to land a tenure-track appointment are often ill-prepared for the competing demands they face in balancing research productivity with excellence in teaching.

While postdoctoral appointments in the sciences have traditionally been available to assist in the transition from graduate work to faculty responsibilities, few such opportunities have existed in fields outside of the sciences and even fewer have focused on the teaching — as opposed to research — aspects of career development.

“Lawrence is a perfect place for recent Ph.D.s to observe and gain experience in strong teaching and prepare for the next stage in their careers,” the president says. “Lawrence has an unusually high degree of one-on-one learning between students and faculty, through tutorials, independent study offerings, and faculty-student research and artistic collaboration.

“Such educational practices are valued throughout the liberal arts college sector,” she adds. “I am confident that, as the fellows complete their time at Lawrence, they will have fully developed both the skills and professional perspectives that will lead to highly successful undergraduate teaching careers.”

The answer
The fellows have reduced teaching assignments so that they may engage in tutorials and research projects with Lawrence students. Mentoring relationships with senior faculty and among the
fellows themselves will be promoted, and there will be ample opportunities for teaching and research collaborations between the fellows and Lawrence faculty.

For geology fellow David Sunderlin (pictured, above), the innovative nature of Lawrence’s new program is what originally caught his eye, but it was the opportunity to “be immersed in a research and teaching environment that values one-on-one contact with students and small group discussions” that really convinced him to apply.

“I found the people of the geology department — students and faculty alike — to be creative thinkers who are both interesting themselves and interested in the big issues that face earth scientists today,” says Sunderlin, who looks forward to involving students in his own research and collaborating on other earth science and paleontology topics that interest them. “I am eager to learn along with the students in that regard,” he adds.

Daniel Barolsky, Lawrence Fellow in Music History and Theory, was attracted to the challenge of creating new course offerings. “Having just finished my Ph.D., I wanted to teach courses that allowed me to push some of the ideas that I had spent the last three years working on,” he says. “The fellowship will allow me to design innovative classes that will challenge both the students and me, unlike other positions I looked at that required me to teach the same courses year after year.

“As a graduate of Swarthmore College, I’m thrilled to return to a small, stimulating liberal arts environment, and Lawrence stands out from almost all liberal arts colleges insofar as it has a substantial and respectable conservatory,” adds Barolsky. “I couldn’t have found a more ideal setting, one that combines intellectual rigor and curiosity with committed musical performance.”

Psychology professor Peter Glick, who directs the program, believes Lawrence will benefit greatly from the presence of these young postdoctoral fellows. “This is truly one of those situations where everyone will benefit — the students, the faculty, and the fellows,” he says.

For students, Glick notes, it will mean an increase in course offerings and more individualized instructional opportunities, due to the presence of additional faculty members, as well as an overall
decrease in class sizes. Having an even broader range of faculty specializations and talents to draw upon will enrich independent student research and artistic endeavors. Students will also benefit from new connections with highly regarded graduate programs and gain firsthand advice on both postgraduate opportunities and what they can expect in graduate school from those who themselves have recently completed their graduate work.

In addition, Glick predicts that Lawrence faculty members will be presented with new avenues for
research and artistic collaboration, benefiting directly from working with the best of what top-ranked graduate schools are producing in terms of emerging scholarship. Moreover, the added presence of the fellows will enable current Lawrence faculty to develop and teach more specialized courses or free themselves to offer more tutorials or independent-study opportunities for their students.

Assistant Professor of Music John Paul Ito, a member of the Lawrence faculty since 2004, thinks the fellowship program will provide opportunities for exciting new avenues of collaboration in teaching. “Daniel Barolsky and I share an area of research specialization — analysis and performance — but we come at it from quite different directions,” says Ito.

“I had been planning to offer a tutorial on analysis for performance as a springboard for eventually developing a course on the same topic. With Daniel here as a fellow, what I had envisioned as a tutorial can instead be half of a team-taught course. I will teach an approach rooted in scores and in physical coordination, while Daniel will take recordings as his point of departure.

“The benefits of this arrangement will be manifold,” he says. “The students will see complementary perspectives on a topic of great interest to performers in the conservatory. And, since I will be able to continue to offer the course after Daniel has moved on, my work developing the full course will essentially have been cut in half. And as a scholar, I will learn about a different area of my field more quickly and efficiently — and no doubt more deeply — than I would have on my own.”

The future
As additional funding becomes available and the program becomes fully established, it is expected that as many as 20 fellows will be in residence throughout the college in any given academic year.

“It is my belief,” says President Beck, “that the Lawrence Fellows program has the potential to become a national model for improving undergraduate teaching. A postdoctoral program of this size and scope, one that promotes the unique attributes of liberal learning at Lawrence, can only serve to further increase recognition of the educational excellence that has been a hallmark of the college.”