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Faculty-Award Citations
At an April 24 event honoring four MHC faculty members, two for outstanding teaching and two for excellence in scholarship, a citation was read about each award winner. Sean Decatur, newly promoted to associate professor of chemistry, and Indira Peterson, professor of Asian studies, received the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship. Rachel Fink, associate professor of biological sciences, and Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor of politics, received the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. The citations are reproduced here in their entirety. Rachel Fink Rachel Fink is famous for her ability to communicate by analogy.
Some of her students also have mastered that art. To capture what
makes her such an effective lecturer one wrote of her "pure interest
in the subject that permeates the auditorium as she teaches,"
while another spoke of "her pure pleasure of teaching (and of
biology)...which like a communicable disease is very catching."
They have it right. Rachel is committed to teaching because she loves
science and wants all her students to be engaged not only by it, but
also by the way scientists think and how they acquire knowledge. She
has argued that "the time with our students in laboratories teaching
them how to answer scientific questions...is the core of what we do."
Because she understands that individuals learn in different ways
she brings a multitude of techniques to her classes. In addition to
colorful analogies, there are physical enactments and time-lapse videos
she has made. She is perhaps best known, however, for her use of a
low-tech tool that has a distinguished lineage in the teaching of
biology: beautiful diagrams in colored chalk. Her creative, multifaceted,
but also highly ordered teaching style makes Rachel unusually successful
in meeting the special challenges of very large classes. In Biological
Sciences 200, with well over 100 students, she is praised for her
presentations which one student characterized as "neat, organized,
efficient, clean, and easy to follow," and for her ability to
elicit and answer questions. Despite her great successes, Rachel regularly takes the risks of
trying out something new. Last year she offered Biological Sciences
305 as a speaking-intensive course with students making oral presentations
and taking oral exams. Many were anxious, but all applauded the results.
She further stretched and excited these students by having them design
their own laboratory experiments. With Rachel there to encourage and
guide, they found themselves being scientists and they celebrated
that. Her teaching, however, extends way beyond her own classes. She has
published two compilations of research videos for the use of other
teachers, and her students' films from time-lapse video microscopy
are being made available to younger viewers. The developmental biology
class's home page even has questions for the community. One shows
pictures of her favorites: sea urchins. You only get partial credit,
however, if you just identify these creatures. Which is male and which
is female, and what is each up to? Most importantly, Rachel's teaching and passion for science extends far, and will continue to have diverse and unpredictable consequences, because her students carry this teaching and passion with them. As one wrote: "She helps to bring science ‘out of the lab and into your life' so that students do not leave their scientific knowledge at the classroom door, but keep it with them as lenses through which they see certain issues and phenomena in the ‘real' world.” Penny Gill Something magical takes place in Penny Gill's classes. But when
we look at course evaluations to find the key to that magic, we often
see students themselves struggling to find words to convey the unique
experience of learning with Penny. Often the phrases they use are
the phrases that recur in the teaching evaluations of many other fine
teachers at Mount Holyoke: accessibility, concern for each student,
a love of her subject, and infinite patience. On the other hand, how
many professors are praised for good crayon usage but then how many
professors incorporate coloring and storytelling in a class, while
simultaneously explaining the difficult concepts of [Carl] Jung? How
many even tackle explorations of the unconscious along with the conscious,
the political, the historical, the philosophical, the whole sweep
of human experience and the particularity of an individual's
life? Something more is going on, however. Clearly students feel they are
learning with Penny, not from Penny. What happens in a course that
transforms students' ways of looking at their own lives and at
the world around them? Over and over they comment on finding their
own voices in her classes. One student noted that her course on Jung
was the only one she had ever taken where every student participated
in class. But this is just the beginning. Although no comment is ever
made to seem irrelevant or wrong, she refuses to let us slide by with
blithe comments and forces us to explain ourselves. She motivates
students to learn, become engaged, and to think on a level that we
are rarely expected or encouraged to do at MHC. At the same time she
pulls the real meaning out of their sometimes groping words. Like
Michelangelo, they feel they are exposing the sculpture that lay waiting
just beneath the surface — discovering ideas that were there
all the time. And whether the topic is politics or Jung or history
or writing, Penny has the knack of connecting the work to students'
own lives. As one student wrote: I am the girl who sits in class and
makes little cooing noises after Penny says something that affects
me, something that I can apply to my life. Perhaps Penny's real
secret is her rare ability to listen to both words and silences. She
always seems to know when we need to talk, when we need to listen,
and when we need to be silly. This extraordinary gift of listening, probing, provoking is also
something Penny's colleagues have learned to treasure. In the Gender
in Context Project in the mid-eighties, in the faculty research series
she initiated some years ago, but most of all in Pasts and Presences
she has helped her fellow teachers to find what is strongest in themselves
and to give it voice. Pasts and Presences, so much her baby, may have
been created to provide first-year students a common experience and
an exposure to the great ideas that have shaped our tradition, but
it has also turned out to be a transformative experience for faculty
who have taught it. Who would have imagined that so many mathematicians
and scientists would have lined up to teach P & P? They did so
largely to be mentored by Penny, to learn how to bring humanist modes--Penny's
modes--of teaching into their own classrooms. They were not disappointed;
they experienced themselves how Penny manages to catalyze their own
best thoughts, to make each class a series of epiphanies for both
student and teacher. These faculty in turn have spread the gospel
in articles intended for colleagues in their disciplinary worlds,
setting off what may be a pedagogical chain reaction. It is not just
the sciences that have recognized Penny's gifts. Whenever a faculty
mentor is needed throughout the College, it is Penny to whom departments
turn. Penny has always refused to be tethered to any one discipline.
It is amusing to read recent evaluations which comment over and over
that Penny's heart and soul lie in teaching European politics when
those of us with longer memories know that her heart has lain in just
about all the nooks and crannies of the arts and social sciences over
the years. Of course the proper designation for Penny Gill is Mary
Lyon Professor of Humanities, along with Professor of Politics. Nothing
human is alien to Penny and nothing human is alien to her students
or to her fellow teachers, all of whom have been touched by her magic.
Sean Decatur The intricate world of atoms and molecules that drives the forces
giving life to all creatures is invisible and inaccessible to most
of us, yet Sean Decatur makes that world real to his students, and
he opens windows into its underlying processes for his professional
colleagues. Sean's research stimulates colleagues to take their
own research in new directions, and inspires the confidence of peer
evaluators. He is a valued and respected member of a broadly based
scientific community of chemists, biochemists, and molecular biologists.
In the brief period since he came to Mount Holyoke, he has had numerous
research publications in highly selective journals and received grants
totaling nearly a million dollars. Sean hit the ground running in
his doctoral research, which still sets the standards for graduate
students in the laboratory of his mentor, and continues to stimulate
new work. In the meantime, he has established his own research program
in which he studies the relationship between structure and function
in proteins, the molecular workhorses of living cells. Sean is a leader
in the field of biophysical chemistry that investigates why a protein
chain folds in a given way and thus assumes a particular function.
Sean is an outstanding scientist because he brings an exceptional
array of talents to his research. He asks important questions. Understanding
how proteins fold will provide a link between genes and cellular function
which will bring us closer to explaining what happens when things
go wrong and suggest avenues for repairing faulty processes. The incredible
complexity of biological molecules such as proteins can be a major
barrier to attacking the important questions, but Sean's creative
application of existing technology has lowered the barrier. To do
this, he designs and constructs small proteins with particular characteristics.
With these simpler systems he uses sophisticated spectroscopic techniques
to follow the dynamics of folding and the lessons learned are applied
to larger biological molecules. His colleagues characterize the results
as "breakthrough," "key," "substantial,"
and "having a significant impact on future studies." Sean's imagination and enthusiasm also become the essence of his
teaching. His "nose for the good problem" extends to the
identification, for his research students, of interesting but "doable”
research projects which are presented at professional meetings and
published in major journals. In the classroom, from introductory chemistry
to physical chemistry, he shares his love of chemistry and students
sense his joy when they succeed in understanding a difficult concept.
As one put it, "the most valuable thing I will take from this
course is the ability to be excited by chemistry." But Sean engages students in more than chemistry, he engages them
in a community: the local community, as they measure lead in paint
samples or mercury levels at the local golf course, and a world community.
By his personal example, and through explicit material in his courses,
Sean demonstrates that science and scientists are not apart from ethical
issues that face society. The introduction of a course on science,
culture, and ethics, the organization of a conference on race and
science, active involvement in local and regional mentoring programs,
and much more, are clear evidence that he is a leader in this arena.
Indira Viswanathan Peterson Indira Viswanathan Peterson is the scholarly equivalent of the winner
of the Olympic pentathlon. She excels in not five but six domains
of South Indian culture: history, music, dance, folklore, religion,
and literature. Her athleticism in language is notable because she
is fluent in her native Tamil, in English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi,
French, and German; she also uses Russian and Greek. Because she is
a notable teacher as well, her students know that she is a performer
in South Indian dance, music, and voice, since she introduces these
arts into her courses. Some of her students here from India say that
she has introduced them to whole areas of literature and history new
to them. Outside Mount Holyoke College she is known as a leading scholar of
classical Sanskrit, of classical and modern Tamil languages and culture,
of classical Hinduism, and of colonial and gender studies. She is
known equally as translator and historian of Sanskrit and Tamil poetry
and sacred hymns. Since 1982, when she first came to Mount Holyoke,
she has published at least one major article a year and she has served
as editor of Indian literature for the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
She has also written three singular books. Poems to Siva, The Hymns
of the Tamil Saints, published in 1998, is the now classic study of
Saiva literature in Tamil, basic for understanding the development
of modern Hinduism. Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court, that
will be published this year, translates and analyzes one of the major
lyrical-narrative works of a great Sanskrit poet. And now nearing
publication is her book on the early Tamil fortune-teller dramas called
"Kuravanci," in which she uses folkloric and other indigenous
sources to study the relationships of literary genres and cultural
identities. If one were to single out any of her articles, it might
be one published in 1999, "The Cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore,"
a study of a European-oriented king in early nineteenth-century India
that involves fascinating accounts of German as well as Indian culture.
Handsome Lord, you have |
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