Naomi Darling awarded 2026 Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Teaching

If you were to generate a word cloud from the student evaluations from Naomi Darling’s architecture and design courses, two phrases would predominate: “hard” and “worth it!” Darling’s students do not design for the sake of imaging; they design to build, and as she notes in one of her reflections on teaching, there are no short cuts in a successful architecture studio. A Darling course will challenge you; it will take time; it will force you to learn things not because they are in the syllabus, but because your project will only take the next step to completion once the next problem is solved. A Darling course is a process whose end result is determined through hard work, persistence, and firm but encouraging criticism from an exceptional teacher.

Naomi’s commitment to architectural studies at Mount Holyoke is all-encompasing. For most of the past five years, her name was synonymous with architectural studies because she was the program director and only faculty member advising all majors and minors on the campus (in addition to serving as the Chair of the Five College Architectural Studies Program). She teaches introductory studios, intermediate courses anchored in the College’s makerspace, and has helped to pilot co-taught courses on DesignBuild for undergraduate and graduate students at UMass Amherst. Until recently, she also single-handedly advised all students undertaking independent study projects, and these numbers have steadily increased during her tenure. In total, she has advised over thirty MHC senior thesis and independent study projects since starting as an assistant professor in the Five Colleges just over a decade ago. Many of these students have continued with graduate studies in architecture at some of the most prestigious programs in the country, including Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Yale’s School of Architecture. She regularly participates in campus discussions of inclusive pedagogy, and, beyond the Five Colleges, she has published the results of her classroom innovations in several peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

The line that forms outside of Naomi’s office for student meetings is often long, filled with students seeking advice on courses, careers, graduate study, or constructive criticism on their projects. Part of what makes her courses challenging is that she does not readily hand out easy solutions to student questions or problems. Part of what unfolds in a design process is learning that builds on itself, through perseverance, to bring students to deeper insights, competencies, and creativity. Colleagues praise her care and consideration in providing feedback to students, but also her willingness to hold them accountable for their responsibilities. “In this way,” reported one, “she instills an ethos of personal and intellectual self-determination, allowing room for her students to make and learn from mistakes as well as successes, while also being there for them as a support and mentor.” The results are evident in the dedication of her many students and in the vibrancy of architectural studies at Mount Holyoke. It is for her dedication to the craft of learning by doing, and the mentorship that this requires, that Naomi Darling is the recipient of the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Teaching.