And the Envelope, Please!

I have always been a reader and look forward to my lunch hour as much for the chance to open a book as for the chance to catch a bite. Today, it was Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, a coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York. Russo has a knack for drawing characters that are simultaneously flawed, lovable, and funny – characters, in short, who are very human. As writers often do, Russo writes about what he knows and what he knows is academia, teaching, and, well, writing. In Straight Man he captures much of the quirkiness that defines university life and the occasionally surreal world of the faculty meetings his protagonist goes to great lengths to escape. In Bridge of Sighs one of his characters is Mr. Berg. A high-school English teacher, Mr. Berg is a quixotic author who aims to pen the perfect novel and to rid his town of its moral failings. And while these obsessions consume his life outside the classroom, inside it he uses his substantial intellect and quick wit to engage a disparate group of students and compel them to begin thinking for themselves. Although Mr. Berg’s personality and approach to teaching both border on madness, he is engaging and manages to hold his students’ interests. And while I would never put forth Mr. Berg as a model for teachers to emulate, it was his gift for stimulating his admittedly fictional students that had me wondering this afternoon: What makes a teacher great? How do great teachers enable their students to learn? How do great teachers encourage their students to begin, despite their often substantial reluctance, to think for themselves?

These were the questions on my mind when I returned from lunch today and opened the most recent issue of the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America and discovered that one of my dissertation committee members, Stuart Fisher, had been awarded the 2008 Eugene P. Odum Education Award. This award “recognizes an ecologist for outstanding work in ecology education”. Stuart is most certainly deserving. I could not possibly enumerate the ways in which he influenced my education, but it would be fair to say that he made me a better ecologist and, more importantly, a better thinker. I chose to attend Arizona State University largely because of the dinners he hosted with my advisor, Nancy Grimm. These functions provided forums where we could discuss the merits of recent contributions to the ecological literature and the challenges of our own research. Perhaps more surprisingly, they were also used to discuss how we could become more effective teachers and the importance of mentoring students.

Stuart has spent a lot of time thinking about teaching and has come up with some novel and clever ways to stimulate thought in his students. One of my favorites was juxtaposition. Stuart posited that new, creative ideas could be generated by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated concepts or observations. He wrote a paper on this idea in 1997, Creativity, idea generation, and the functional morphology of streams, which was published in the Journal of the North American Benthological Society, but he also challenged his students to use juxtaposition to stimulate thought in his classes. I still remember when, nearly 10 years ago, I was asked to write an essay for his Ecosystems class based on the confluence of a couple of ideas he appeared to have pulled from the ether. Of course, he hadn’t. The ideas weren’t that disparate. And, of course, they did make me think. I don’t remember the fruits of that exercise today, but I do remember the process and use the technique from time to time to try and get my creative juices flowing. For this, and many other lessons, I am ever grateful that I had Dr. Fisher as a teacher.
Thanks, Stuart