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.”
See also: www.lawrence.edu/dept/fellows/bios.shtml