TONY BUTTERFIELD

As a young PhD, I had never seriously considered a career as a teacher; I effectively fell into the profession by filling a one-time emergency vacancy. The misconceptions that once kept me from a career in academia, however, have become key influences on my teaching philosophy over the last decade. That one-semester has since turned into years of meaningful and rewarding work, and I will be forever grateful that I was wrong about what it could mean to be a professor.

Effective teaching is evidence-based. I was under the impression that the great teachers in my life had innate abilities. However, teaching is a skill like any other, to be researched, practiced, and constantly refined. Excellent and impactful research on student learning is abundant and ongoing, and it is my obligation to remain current on, incorporate, and contribute to our body of evidence-based pedagogy. I must treat my teaching as seriously as any research program and design my curriculum to engage students with proven interventions, just as I would design a reactor as an engineer to obtain the best outcomes. Far more clearly than what we are told in a lecture, people remember and retain what they say, what they do, and the facts they personally discover through active and collaborative learning; I work to build my courses on a methodological foundation that has demonstrable efficacy.

Effective teaching is inclusive. I remember how it feels to take the long way through campus to avoid bigotry and threats, only to get to a classroom led by faculty who are only more subtle with their bias than peers. I know a hostile campus climate can hold down a student’s potential, undermine meritocracies, and blunt even the most effective pedagogy. As such, to do my job properly I must first build and nurture a healthy, welcoming, and friendly climate.  We must produce technically formidable professionals, and to do that we have to help our students avoid great professional and personal harm to themselves and others through workplace hostility, bias, and harassment. My teaching should address those topics both when they intersect with the technical content and as topics deserving of their own dedicated instruction, if I am to truly prepare our students for a successful and ethical career.

Effective teaching is diffusive. I feared a life in academia would default into an insular small town of ivory towers. But education should be democratizing and diffusive, and our work should be meant to solve larger societal problems. Without engagement of and feedback from the larger community, we are not using the full educational potential of a university. I see myself as obligated to take our work to the larger community, through outreach and mentoring programs to attract underrepresented students and through citizen scientist efforts to engage the population in addressing environmental concerns.

Effective teaching is personal. This was not obvious to me as a student or as a new professor. Most all of my professors seemed to be aloof and infallible magicians. It can be tempting to put on professorial airs and hide our humanness in front of a classroom. However, some of the most striking stories of success I have seen through this work have been from times I have become emotionally engaged, when I have shared my failures, when I have paused teaching to help a student, person-to-person. This can be an emotionally strenuous job; we see personal trauma on campus the likes of which I would have never anticipated. When our students need help, it is my responsibility to be a compassionate person, not only a professor. To best educate engineers, I have to work to be a decent, humane, and active listener, as well as to know my limits and how to get our students to the professional resources they need.  The most rewarding part of this job is being witness so many stories of personal success; to be a part of that process comes with a solemn human responsibility.