Sunday, March 29, 2009

Lewis & Clark students as scholars

Our academic program is based on collaboration between students and faculty members, not only in the classroom but also in the studio, stage, laboratory, and the field. Much of the success described above is a direct result of our faculty, who are excellent teacher-scholars, training our students to become student-scholars. Much of this training happens during the academic year, but some of the most important teaching at the College happens during the summer, when students and faculty members collaborate on research projects. During the summer of 2008, 31 faculty members and 59 students participated in College-sponsored faculty-student collaborative research.

Examples of teams and projects include:
  • Franya Berkman, assistant professor of music, and student Austin Moore ’10 – “Charanga Chops: Flute Virtuosity in Latin Jazz.”
  • Andrew Cortell, associate professor of international affairs, and student Anne Swift ’09 – “Why Legalize International Trade? U.S. Support for Dispute Resolution Mechanisms in the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.”
  • John Fritzman, associate professor of philosophy and student Molly Gibson ’10 – “From Nature to Idea: Schelling’s Evolutionary Process of Hegel’s Conceptual Development.”
    Click here to download the pdf file of Professor Fritzman and Molly Gibson's article, featured in the Winter 2008 edition of Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), Volume 29(2).
  • Bethe Scalettar, professor of physics, and Janis Lochner, Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Professor of Science, and students Audrey Fulwiler ’09 and Conor Jacobs ’09 – “Synaptic Secretion of Neuromodulators Implicated in Long-Term Memory Formation.”
    In many instances collaborations between students and faculty lead to publication of the work in peer-reviewed academic outlets. For example, eighty undergraduates have published jointly with faculty members in national and international science, mathematics, and engineering journals since 2000.

International education at Lewis & Clark College

For nearly 50 years Lewis & Clark College has distinguished itself as a liberal arts college committed to international education. Since 1962 over 10,000 students and 235 faculty and staff members have participated in more than 700 overseas and off-campus programs in 66 countries around the world, always maintaining a balance of at least 60 percent of the programs outside of western Europe. Annually, the college is recognized as a leader among elite institutions in the numbers of students studying abroad and in the diversity of offerings in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe.

To foster a stronger sense of global citizenship among its students, the College has introduced new programming in Russia, Vietnam, Greece, Cuba, New Zealand and the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Future programs are being developed in Brazil and Morocco. For the first time in recent years we have also seen enhanced interest by the faculty to lead overseas programs.

Students return from their experience abroad with a new understanding of the world and an appreciation that their personal choices make a difference.

We are receiving national recognition for how our students make meaning of the international education they receive at Lewis & Clark. In 2008 Lewis & Clark ranked among the top 20 undergraduate colleges in the country in the production of Fulbright Award winners for 2008-09. Six Lewis & Clark students won Fulbright Scholarships last year and are now pursuing teaching and research opportunities abroad. Moreover, Lewis & Clark tied for ninth in the nation among small colleges and universities with the most Peace Corps Volunteers in 2007. Since the Peace Corps’ inception in 1961, 312 Lewis & Clark alumni have served in the organization’s ranks.

Exploration and Discovery

The College’s first-year core program, Exploration and Discovery, described recently in the Lewis & Clark Chronicle, is now halfway through its third year of implementation. By every measure the program has been a success, with strong faculty support from those teaching in E&D as well as from those not currently participating. Most every academic department is contributing faculty members to the program, and those that have not as yet contributed are slated to do so in the next year or two.

The faculty found their students to have significantly improved in their writing, critical thinking, careful reading, and speaking (discussion) skills, and to have found the course to be engaging. These impressions are clearly borne out by the course evaluations, which show a majority of students viewing their skills as having improved. The majority of students also expressly praise the fall course—quite an accomplishment for a required, first-year class. The fall semester was also invigorated by a special lecture by the renowned political columnist Katha Pollitt.
The 2009 faculty will be convened next month to determine the fall slate of books, once again demonstrating the real vitality and evolutionary basis of E&D: they will stamp their own mark on the common slate, ensuring that those works are ones they find to be the most teachable and most valuable, and that this band of faculty is invested in those selected works and in the course as a whole.

Enthusiasm & Expertise...

The E&D faculty brings wonderful enthusiasm and expertise to their individual, and very individualized, sections for the spring (where every section is distinctive as well as being interdisciplinary and historically broad). The spring has proved the perfect complement to the fall and its common, “great books” paradigm, offering faculty a way of “moonlighting” in areas—and between disciplines—outside their departments. It has proved to be an exciting opportunity for faculty. One member says his spring course is what he was born to teach, and that he intends to teach it until he’s carried away (!). Students also find the spring to be a fresh and exciting next step, one that follows from the fall course, to be sure, but that opens up more specificity and many more choices. Students continue to find the options to be exciting, and seem almost to forget that these sections are still part of a required yearlong sequence.
In short, E&D is strong. Students continue to find the course to be appropriate and effective—even ideally so—and the faculty continues to be enthusiastic. E&D is teaching what a core program should—writing, critical thinking, and other skills—and garnering very positive results. It is also providing first-year students with a valuable common experience, which includes a “micro-culture” of shared works in the fall—works students continue to refer to and to employ as touchstones in the spring semester and beyond. Given the levels of enthusiasm and the overall success of the program, Exploration and Discovery is likely to continue as the College’s “flagship” first-year program for many years to come. Its success is the result of faculty commitment, enthusiasm, and hard work.

Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Lewis & Clark College

Our programs in the arts, humanities and social sciences receive national recognition as well. Indeed, in one instance Lewis & Clark received the top national accolade. In November of 2008, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, associate professor of psychology, was named the U.S. Professor of the Year in the category of Baccalaureate Colleges by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The CASE/Carnegie prize is the only national award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring. Professor Detweiler-Bedell was recognized for a scholarly approach to teaching, as she integrates meaningful research experiences for students into her courses.

The story of success continues.

In 2008...

Karen Gross, assistant professor of English, received the Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies, one of the premier humanities teaching honors in the liberal arts colleges sector.

Four College of Arts & Sciences faculty members won the Graves Award between 1998 and 2006:

Alan Cole, professor of religious studies (1998)
Nora Beck, professor of music (2000)
Rebecca Copenhaver, associate professor of philosophy (2004)
David Campion, assistant professor of history (2006)

Mary Szybist, assistant professor of English, was awarded a prestigious Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. These highly competitive Fellowships are given to published creative writers of exceptional talent. Professor Szybist was also selected by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan for one of two Witter Bynner Fellowships in Poetry from the Library of Congress. In just the past few months, her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poetry, and The Iowa Review.

David Campion, associate professor of history, received a grant from Fulbright Scholar Program to work with Universities in Hong Kong on development of their general education curricula. Only five awards were made by Fulbright as part of the foundation's Building General Education Curriculum in Hong Kong Universities Program.

The College also embarked on a process to train the professoriate of the future. With support from a grant of $450,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the College of Arts & Sciences has established a teaching post-doctoral program in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The post-doctoral fellows are trained—and mentored—as teachers and scholars, enriching our curriculum and research enterprise with fresh ideas and new opportunities to pursue our interdisciplinary agenda. This year's Mellon Fellow is Marie Sarita Gaytan.

Our students also shine

Ian Feis ’12 received the 2008 Youth Activist Award from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington for his work as a founding member of his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

Selena Jorgensen’08, currently at Harvard University Medical School, won the annual Rudolph Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for best undergraduate paper. Her work was titled “The Little Clinic That Could: Neoliberalism, Structural Violence, and Community Resistance in Portland, Oregon.”

Dante Perez ’11, an international affairs major, received a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute summer internship. According to the Institute, “Every summer, 32 promising Latino undergraduates from across the country are selected for an eight-week program in the nation’s capital. While in D.C., interns work in the offices of U.S. representatives.

Rory Sullivan ’10, a history major, was Lewis & Clark’s first recipient of a Shear-Mellon Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ben Brysacz ‘09, a political science major, was named Truman Scholar, the College’s ninth in the past 16 years. Truman Scholars are selected for their intellectual ability, leadership potential and likelihood of “making a difference.” Recipients must have outstanding communication skills, be in the top quarter of their class and be committed to careers in government or the public sector. The 65 Scholars were selected from among 595 candidates nominated by 283 colleges and universities.

Science at Lewis & Clark College

Early in 2008 the College of Arts and Sciences received a grant from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to establish a Beckman Scholars Program in Chemistry and Biological Sciences. The Beckman Scholars Program “provides scholarships that contribute significantly in advancing the education, research training, and personal development of select students in chemistry, biochemistry, and the biological and medical sciences. The sustained, in-depth undergraduate research experiences and comprehensive faculty mentoring are unique in terms of program scope, content, and level of scholarship awards.”

Later in the year the College received a grant of $1.3 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Science Education Program. The HHMI grant funds the CAUSE (Collaborative Approaches to Undergraduate Science Education) program at Lewis & Clark, with focus on the following main areas:
  • Development of curricula and research initiatives in interdisciplinary science, with special attention to bioinformatics, biophysics, and neuroscience (in collaboration with faculty at Oregon Health & Science University);
  • Development of science courses for students not majoring in the mathematical and natural sciences;
  • A K-12 outreach program for science education, in collaboration with the Graduate School of Education and Counseling;
  • An international outreach program for science education, with special attention to collaboration with institutions in East Africa; and
  • A teaching post-doctoral fellows program in the sciences.

It is important to underscore that Lewis & Clark was the only liberal arts College in Oregon, and one of only six in the West, to receive this major recognition, reserved by HHMI to those institutions with excellent academic programs and the potential to implement innovative strategies that can become national models for the improvement of science education and research.

Indeed, our numbers on science education do tell a story of excellence and success. Over $8 million in grants have been awarded to science faculty members since 2001. And in the last seven years we have seen an increase by 514 percent in research grant dollars awarded to faculty members in mathematics and natural sciences. Current funding sources include the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Research Corporation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, American Chemical Society, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, The Geological Society of America, Merck Institute for Science Education, and the Mathematical Association of America. Very recently, Naiomi Cameron, assistant professor of mathematics, received a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Eight of our last 12 National Science Foundation grant proposals have been funded, and all four National Institutes of Health proposals submitted in the last three years have been funded.
These agencies fund on average fewer than 20 percent of proposals. In 2008 three faculty members received major awards from the National Science Foundation. Brian Detweiler-Bedell and Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell, both associate professors of psychology, received a $149,648 grant from the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program for their work, “Using Laddered Teams to Promote a Research-Supportive Curriculum.” Anne Bentley, assistant professor of chemistry, received a $100,000 Discovery Corps Faculty Development Award to support her research and teaching. And Nikolaus Loening, assistant professor of chemistry, received a $191,764 Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) program grant from the National Institutes of Health to support his research program aimed at discovering interesting peptides and proteins from the venom of the brown recluse spider and its relatives.
Our science students represent an essential part of our success story. Our student-scholars are well positioned to become leaders in science, and forty percent of recent graduates in biochemistry/molecular biology, biology, and chemistry are enrolled in graduate or M.D. programs.

Twenty-two Lewis & Clark students have received Goldwater Scholarships since the program’s inception in 1993. Allison Akagi, a senior majoring in chemistry and Claire Fassio and Conor Jacobs, both seniors majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology; each received Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships. The scholarships support “study in the fields of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences as preparation for careers in these areas.”

Eleven Lewis & Clark students have received National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships since 1984. Currie ’07 received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Biochemistry. Melissa Callahan ’05, Sarah Collins ’07, Christopher ’05, and Shannon McGonagle ’04 all received honorable mention.