Faculty Honors

Top teachers ‘open a window’ on learning

Linguist, literature prof, biologist, and Latin-poetry specialist receive 2007 Distinguished Teaching Award, Berkeley’s highest honor for instruction

By Yasmin Anwar

The class of ‘07: From left, Lacey, Goldsmith, McCarthy, Garrett. (Peg Skorpinski photo)

Summer 2007 | Four Berkeley professors — each with creative ideas on teaching and learning — received the 2007 Distinguished Teaching Award in the spring. The award is presented by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching, comprising faculty members and students. It is one of the campus’s most coveted honors.

As part of the rigorous screening process, selectors read at least two years’ worth of students’ teaching evaluations — which can number in the thousands — evaluate each candidate’s teaching philosophy and course materials, and observe them as they teach.
Presented here are brief profiles of the honorees. For more, including videos of current and past winners, visit teaching.berkeley.edu/dta07.

Andrew Garrett

An associate professor of linguistics, Andrew Garrett comes from a family of teachers, including two of his grandparents, his father, and several uncles and aunts. His brother is a Tibetan linguist, and his sister is a scholar of Tibetan religion; both teach. So it’s not surprising that Garrett says he never seriously considered any career but teaching.

He came to Berkeley in 1995 and began his focus on endangered California Indian languages, such as Yurok, spoken in northwestern California by the state’s largest Indian tribe.

Garrett, who teaches classes in historical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, and American Indian linguistics, especially delights in teaching an upper-division course that introduces students to linguistic science and reflects “the very broadest purpose of undergraduate linguistics education — opening a window on human diversity and fragility.”

In addition to his campus teaching, he works with the Yurok tribe, regularly making a 600-mile round-trip drive to the North Coast to conduct field work and offer grammar classes to Yurok teachers eager to teach younger tribal members how to keep their language alive. Today there are about a dozen fluent Yurok speakers, all of them elderly, trying to spread their language to youth in local elementary and high schools.

Steven Goldsmith

Steven Goldsmith, associate professor of English, says he views teaching as “thinking aloud together,” whether in a small course or a large lecture class.

“If by ‘thinking aloud’ I can make the pleasure of careful, patient discovery accessible to my students,” he says, “then they return that pleasure in the form of their own more rigorous and imaginative arguments, their own more probing questions, and their willingness to challenge limits I myself did not recognize.”

Goldsmith’s interest in literature came from hearing poetry read aloud by his University of Michigan professor and from discovering major English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and William Blake. “Most people grow out of their attachment to Romanticism,” he says. “I didn’t.”

Popular at Berkeley for his courses on Blake and on the Bible as literature, Goldsmith has developed a new class called “Why Do We Cry? The Literature of Sorrow, Sympathy, and Indifference.” He says that literature classes are among the few places where “unaccountable knowledge can still happen” as students freely discuss sensitive and controversial issues, not hindered by the weighty responsibilities of policymakers or specialists.

Former student Edward Ballister recalls Goldsmith’s “dazzling, captivating lectures” and his integration of fields from history to modern art “into a fascinating course of study” on the Bible as literature.

Eileen Lacey

Graduates of Eileen Lacey’s animal-behavior class never look at nature films the same way again. She uses film clips in her highly interactive classes to spur students to question what they see, and to maintain a critical eye when it comes to animal behavior — and human behavior as well.

“I want them to sit back and ask, ‘Hey, do I believe that? Do I agree with that? Does that make sense?’” says Lacey, associate professor of integrative biology and curator of mammals at the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “From the start of the class early in the semester they go from being relatively accepting and tolerant of everything I’m saying to questioning and challenging me on things.”

Lacey, who studies social behavior in rodents, came to Berkeley in 1996. Graduate student Samuel Díaz Muñoz praises her lectures, which he says are “sprinkled with efficient use of multimedia, to get students motivated to observe and ask questions about animal behavior and to deliver concepts in a way that words sometimes cannot.”

Students laud her accessibility and the lively and fun dialogue she encourages in the classroom. Says Roy Caldwell, chair of her department, “Because of her effective and personal style of lecturing, students quickly identify with Eileen. She is a role model, particularly for women, as a professor and scientist.”

Kathleen McCarthy

“I think conversation is one of the great pleasures of life, and the reason I enjoy teaching is that it offers a specialized form of conversation,” says Kathleen McCarthy, an associate professor in classics and comparative literature who specializes in Latin poetry.

Whether teaching the large, lower-division “Introduction to Roman Civilization” lecture course or much smaller, more intimate Latin classes, McCarthy relies on conversation to convey information and to stimulate discussion, inquiry, and the sharing of ideas.

“We don’t normally prepare for conversations,” she writes, “but in teaching, the conversation will quickly fall flat if the teacher hasn’t figured out in advance both the relevant factual information and a strategy for communicating it.” Her strategy in her lecture class is to pose an open question, usually something requiring deductive ability rather than deep knowledge of the classics, so all students are on the same footing. She also breaks up the lecture into sections, pausing for questions between them.

McCarthy, whose mother was an elementary-school art teacher, became interested in literature and history as an undergraduate, but realized that classics allowed her to pursue both fields. She once taught high-school Latin, but moved to the university level to be more deeply engaged in literature and to write.

Leslie Kurke, chair of Berkeley’s classics department, commended McCarthy for her “range, creative imagination, and ambition.”