Teaching, in my opinion, is the most important work that we do. My philosophy of teaching has evolved considerably and irreversibly since I began teaching more than a decade ago. I believed in my youth that being a good teacher meant delivering organized, memorable and entertaining lectures. Today, while these are still mainstays of my teaching approach, I am convinced that much of good teaching occurs outside the classroom. Good teaching now means to me creating opportunities in research and education that might otherwise not exist. Creating opportunity has come to mean instilling in students the vision to see beyond the trappings of a routine undergraduate degree and providing the support and direction that is essential for them to succeed at a higher level. As evidence of their abilities, my students have trained abroad in Costa Rica, South Africa, Panama, Peru and the Lesser Antilles. They have designed and funded their own research projects, published their results in international journals and presented their work at national and international scientific conferences.
This philosophy of opportunity did not evolve in a vacuum, rather it was taught by example by my graduate mentor at the University of Utah, Dr. Phyllis (Lissy) Coley. I have begun to model my teaching and advising efforts after Lissy because of her phenomenal success as an educator and mentor. To explain more fully how Lissy Coley embodies my teaching philosophy, and rather than recount the details of her tremendous success, I will tell you the story of how she changed the course of my career and my life, and influenced my sense of my own ability.
Having grown up in rural eastern Iowa, my understanding of plant biology was everything that a sea of soybean and hybrid corn fields could teach me. The community was indeed rural and most of northern Jackson County, Iowa, was inhabited by Sagerses; the boys grew up and got a part of the farm, and the girls grew up and married the neighbors. Girls were meant to stay home, raise kids and cook a fried chicken dinner on Sunday. My cousin, Dirk, was the first in the family to go off to college. I left for school three years later. At the time, the University of Iowa was a stronghold of ecology and, surprisingly, tropical ecology, so before I could dust the corn pollen from my loafers I was signed on as a field assistant counting trees on a 50 hectare plot of land in Panama. On a small bit of forest in the middle of the Panama Canal I met Lissy Coley.
Lissy's accomplishments were legendary at the Barro Colorado Island field laboratory before she even graduated from the University of Chicago. In the jobless days of the early '80s Lissy had already bagged a Smithsonian post-doc, a position at the University of Utah, and a seminal publication in "Ecological Monographs" and her now landmark "Nature" paper was in review. As we anticipated her arrival, I expected her to be a giant, intense, reserved, dispassionate and terribly grave person. When the boat carrying her arrived on the island, to my complete surprise, a petite, attractive woman stepped off onto the boat dock laughing. This was Lissy Coley.
Three years later I interviewed for graduate school at the University of Utah. When I first saw Lissy during that visit, she was surrounded by a group of students. During the five years I was at Utah when I saw Lissy, she was, most of the time, surrounded by students. Lissy was on everyone's committee, read everyone's proposals, gave everyone advice. Lissy was in everyone's confidence and contributed to everyone's progress.
As I found in the next years, Lissy is an especially good editor and her skills were brought into heavy service while I was in her lab. Before Utah, I had written exactly one letter to the editor of my high school newspaper, one expository writing assignment that described the sound of bacon cooking, and one term paper on the correlation between nest size and aggressive behaviors in the genus Polistes. I was little prepared for a graduate program in biology. Nonetheless, while I was at Utah my proposals were funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Smithsonian Institution. I published two papers in "Ecology" and another in "Functional Ecology." Before I defended my dissertation, I had three post-doc offers and an assistant professor position at the University of Arkansas. My productivity and successes at Utah I largely attribute to Lissy. She was far more confident in me than I was of myself. I have no doubts that her support moved me to places I otherwise might not have gotten.
Creating opportunity is now the core of my teaching philosophy, as it was for Lissy. Opportunity can be no more important than here where the typical freshman is supported on a low-income grant or fellowship (85%), and will drop out before his/her senior year (53%). Only the rare student has written a term paper, given a public talk or been involved in research. Most freshmen graduated from a high school with fewer than 200 students, took their last biology class in the 10th grade, and had a single instructor for all of their high school science courses. Nearly everyone is Caucasian (84.9%), may have been raised in a mobile home (27% of all residences) and educated in a public school system that is in need of $1.6 trillion dollars in repairs. Nonetheless, Arkansas students are smart. As evidence, SAT scores of U. of Arkansas students are comparable to other public universities in the region (25-75 %ile ranges: Arkansas 20-26; University of Kansas 20-26; University of Oklahoma 21-27). The question is not whether these students can learn. Rather, the question is whether I have the skill to deliver exceptional instruction, the dedication and strength to move them beyond provincial expectations, and the wherewithal to encourage them to be bold in this world.
I am no longer in the cornfields. I am in an ivory tower. I am an associate professor at the University of Arkansas training students that have the same level of expertise that I had, the experiences that I had, the expectations that I had when I was 17 years old. I know now that each of them can do what I have done. They need an agenda, they need skills, and they need encouragement. Lissy Coley taught me by example that beyond grants, beyond publications, beyond promotion, my job is to create opportunities for students and give them the confidence they need to move forward.