Resize Text: 
One of my chief delights as editor of Change is to read, every year, the personal statements of students who have won the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award. Pat Cross, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, has long been a leading scholar in higher education, Her work has focused on teaching, classroom assessment, adult students, and community colleges—so it is appropriate that the eponymous honor awarded by the Association of American Colleges and Universities identifies graduate students who have demonstrated strong commitments to teaching and learning; academic and civic responsibility; and the development of others as leaders, scholars, and citizens.
These future leaders of higher education, working in a variety of disciplines, address a question posed in this issue’s editorial: how are we going to continue to attract the best and brightest into our profession, given all the pressures that it is under? It seems that somehow, we are still managing to do so. Drawn from the personal statements that accompanied their nomination materials, the students’ own words will show you why I believe that.
Here, with their permission, are the voices of the 2009 award winners.
—Margaret A. Miller
Executive Editor
Change magazine
Like previous Cross Award winners, the members of the 2009 group are distinguished by a particular style of leadership. They have “organized,” “founded,” and “led” organizations and projects that have done a great deal of good. But words such as “empowered,” “connected,” “linked,” “engaged with,” and “combined” pepper their statements as well, suggesting that they share power and responsibilities with the people with whom they work.
In their own words ...
I have facilitated numerous workshops on topics such as power and privilege, creating inclusive classrooms, and teaching and learning for audiences across discipline and status within the university. As program coordinator for the Diversity Education Program, I helped redesign our university-wide diversity training for teaching assistants (TAs) and supported a group of TAs who led these trainings in their respective departments. I also founded an interdisciplinary research group interested in Civil Rights Movement scholarship. Additionally, I have led semester-long professional development seminars, called Expeditions in Learning (EL), for graduate students, academic staff, and faculty that focus on teaching and diversity.
—Tessa Lowinske Desmond
At the University of Washington, I have served on panels about improving the recruitment and retention of students of color sponsored by the Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP) in the graduate school (2001 to present) and cultivated relationships with fellow Latinas/os by helping form a Latino/a Graduate Ph.D. Association (2006). Over the last few years I have also coordinated a mentoring project to combat cuts in bilingual education from No Child Left Behind by matching UW second-language speakers to primary and secondary ESL students in Seattle primary and secondary public schools.
—Lisa Thornhill
While a student, I founded a non-profit organization that seeks to bring basic medical care to the poorest of the poor while teaching others of the challenges faced by the underprivileged and encouraging them to strive to alleviate human suffering. In this context, I direct an intensive 6-week course to teach the language of Haitian Creole, which serves to enhance travelers’ learning experiences while they are immersed in a foreign culture. I also volunteer to facilitate a neuroanatomy laboratory course for underrepresented minority students from Houston-area high schools, emphasizing the destructive effects of drug and alcohol abuse on the delicate human brain and the importance of education in their immediate future. Finally, I help high school educators from underprivileged city schools become better teachers through a summer teacher development workshop.
—Geoff Preidis
These future leaders see teaching as an active process of self- and other-discovery in which both teacher and student are learners.
My work at the University of Hawai'i has given me the opportunity to collaborate meaningfully with students, colleagues, and professors from different linguistic, socio-economic, and ethnic backgrounds than my own. I have also come to realize that this location presents a particular set of challenges for a Caucasian woman from the Continental Midwest who aspires to teach in ways that promote civic responsibility and social justice: teaching and working in Hawai'i, a place whose English classrooms inherit an ugly history of colonialist practices, has pushed me to acknowledge the limitations of my own cultural framework and to more critically conceptualize (and re-conceptualize) my work as a teacher, researcher, and administrator.
—Holly Huff Bruland
I design my curriculum to represent a multiplicity of views and experiences so that each of my students will see pieces of themselves reflected in the material—like a mirror. By the very nature of this wide-ranging curriculum, I am also able to expose students to unfamiliar stories and histories—thus using the curriculum as a window through which they learn about others. Through this approach, I acknowledge diversity in the classroom, build confidence in underrepresented students, and help expand all students’ worldviews.
—Tessa Lowinske Desmond
The doctoral process of doing research, creating knowledge, writing and presenting papers at national conferences, and becoming adept at critical thinking, has been enjoyable (and challenging) beyond my wildest expectations. But in this process, I have discovered capacity and talents that I truly did not even know existed, and my expectations for myself have continued to increase.
—Marcella Runell Hall
As a member of HAC [Honor Advisory Council], I have helped bridge the gap between students and faculty in order to promote academic honesty and help each side understand the other. A special area of emphasis for me has been to address how differing cultural standards of academic integrity impact international students. In consultation with staff in the Offices of Student Integrity and International Education as well as a teacher of English as a second language, I developed a program for new international students that focuses on those cultural differences and helps our students comprehend the importance of understanding and meeting the expectations of the American academic environment.
—Mitchel Keller
My students have not only transformed the way I think about American history but they have also transformed the way I think about myself as a mentor in the classroom and as a citizen in the university.
—Tamara Mann
Although I was raised in a family of educators, my love of teaching and learning truly took shape while my husband and I served in the Peace Corps in Suriname, South America. ... I was in charge of 42 children ranging in age from 6 to 13. I learned valuable lessons about patience and persistence from the first graders that I apply to teaching in the college classroom. The most valuable lesson I learned was how much my students could teach me inside and outside of the classroom.
—Elizabeth Munz
One reason that the K. Patricia Cross Award excites me is because we share a commitment to mentorship by valuing teaching practices that facilitate students’ personal development in relation to their conception of civic responsibilities both within and between the university and non-university sites.
—Lisa Thornhill
The Cross Award winners are committed educators who demonstrate a serious scholarly and practical interest in how and to what effect we teach.
The quantitative and qualitative data I have now collected from instructors, graduate student mentors, and first-year students alike participating in over 35 mentored sections of first-year composition is actively informing how the program is being conceptualized and administered. Furthermore, a recent large-scale assessment of our first-year writing program, which I co-designed, also showed that first-year students in mentored sections performed significantly better than their un-mentored counterparts in terms of written content, organization, and meta-cognitive vocabulary. I suspect, however, that the long-term effects of such mentoring on participants’ engagement, self-directed learning, and (hopefully) rates of graduation may be even more profound than these immediate findings in students’ writing, and I look forward to tracking both semester-length and longitudinal outcomes in my dissertation.
—Holly Huff Bruland
I realized that the process by which we as scientists carry out scientific inquiry bears little resemblance to how most scientists teach their students to conduct experiments in lab classrooms. Scientists conduct experiments—carrying out a rigorous test of ideas and hypotheses by creatively collecting and evaluating data that is scrutinized and interpreted—in order to address a research question or problem to which the answer is currently unknown. However, in most lab classrooms, students do not experience the challenge and joy involved in making their own discoveries, since they follow pre-determined directions in order to complete experiments with specified results. Consequently, I was surprised by the disparity between how I was expected to teach my students versus how I did science in the lab. The recognition of this disparity is what sparked my interest not only to teach science but to change the way we teach.
—Cara Gormally
I had the opportunity to totally revamp the [teaching assistants’ orientation program] to increase the positive impact it would have on our TAs. The orientation had historically been a series of administrators speaking about important, but technical, issues such as student privacy, academic integrity, diversity, and students with disabilities to an audience of 250 in a large lecture hall for three hours. At some point during this orientation, someone from CETL would inevitably stand up and give the “do as I say, not as I do speech” in order to convince the TAs to use active learning in their classes, despite the way they were being introduced to teaching-related issues at Georgia Tech. . . . We incorporated active learning strategies in order to cover the topics that had previously been covered, but by encouraging the TAs to be active in the orientation, we increased what they were able to retain.
—Mitchel Keller
I help train incoming graduate students from the Department of Communication and from other departments across campus. ... I love this part of the assistant course director position because it enables me to observe others’ teaching and to praise them for their strengths while also offering concrete suggestions for how to improve their experience in the classroom. Throughout the year, teaching assistants ask me questions about classroom management issues and course administration issues, and I am able to put them at ease and offer suggestions from my own experience with the course.
—Elizabeth Munz
I approach each lecture as a unique opportunity to inspire and leave a permanent impression with students. Whether flinging a raw egg against the wall to illuminate the physics of automobile accidents, or recounting the struggles of a family of 17 grinding out a meager living in rural Haiti to shed light on the complex nature of global inequalities and infectious diseases, I seek to illustrate concepts by leaving my students with images they’ll never forget.
—Geoff Preidis
I taught Technology and Human Values for the Departments of Philosophy and Technology of Public Policy at Hofstra University. All my students were majoring in engineering. I created a curriculum geared toward the kinds of environmental justice and technology issues that engineers often face. I also, as requested by the Engineering Department, designed an ethics assessment. The students took the first part of the assessment at the beginning of the semester and the second part at the end. The goal was to give the faculty feedback on the students’ progress in understanding the moral dimensions of engineering issues.
—Kyle Whyte
And teaching is not something that ends at the classroom door but spills over all sorts of borders.
Building relationships with unlikely partners on campus is how we make change. ... Recently I received a grant for a UW-Madison program called Humanities Exposed that seeks to bridge another major gap—that between the university and underprivileged communities in Madison. In this project, I aim to facilitate English/Spanish conversation partnerships using short, accessible pieces of literature translated into both languages. The people I will work with are all part of a community garden in Madison, where I already volunteer, whose mission is to bring healthy, sustainable food within reach of those in poverty. This project is yet another example of how I work on many levels within and beyond the university—as a trainer, teacher, and activist—to contribute to positive change and equity.
—Tessa Lowinske Desmond
For two summers, I worked with the Schoolyard Project, a program supported by the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research site in which middle and high school teachers work alongside of scientists conducting ecological fieldwork. This is an opportunity for scientists to both communicate their science to a broader audience and make an impact on science education, as well as for teachers to participate in current research and translate that experience into inquiry-based classroom projects. I have also conducted workshops for 2nd graders and their elementary school teachers to expose them to basic biological and ecological concepts.
—Cara Gormally
When I graduated college, I traveled to Ghana and Ukraine to build a schoolhouse and restore a synagogue before taking a job at a non-profit dedicated to forging coalitions among religious groups in New York City. My work at the Interfaith Center exposed me to extraordinary educators working in religious institutions, museums, and public schools across the city. Inspired by their enthusiasm, I took every opportunity to improve my teaching. I created public programs at the Interfaith Center, trained high school students at the Brooklyn Museum, and gave tours at the Jewish Museum. When I decided to enter a Ph.D. program, I knew that teaching, mentorship, and public education would be my priorities.
—Tamara Mann
Deeply influenced by their experiences—as a waitress, as a person who sat all too close to the World Trade Center on a fateful day, as an American Indian—they believe in their capacity, and the capacity of those whom they mentor, to shape their future and the future of others. They don’t have a fatalistic bone in their collective body.
In the middle of my senior year of high school, I panicked about how I was going to be able to afford to go away to college. ... My mother and stepfather refused to take out loans for my education, and would not allow me to become an emancipated student. So I had to get creative.
One day, shortly after I turned eighteen, I skipped school and auditioned to be a cocktail waitress in a nearby Atlantic City casino. I was hired immediately and began working six nights a week throughout my senior year and all summer. I had calculated that if my parents paid the small portion of tuition and fees that they were willing to pay for community college, I could handle rest with my savings (at least for my first year). My plan was exhausting and difficult on many levels—but it worked. I entered Ramapo College of New Jersey in fall 1993, and my life changed forever.
—Marcella Runell Hall
The SEED [Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity] course, which I co-facilitate, uses self-reflection to prepare students for civic engagement. During SEED, students explore power and privilege with regard to several social identity categories, including race, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and religion. Their concluding assignment requires them to develop an action plan that examines at least one aspect of their identity in depth, a larger social problem related to that identity, and what they can do as an individual to help ameliorate the problem.
I commit my life’s work to higher education because I believe strongly in the transformative nature of college—a formative time in lives of students when they begin to solidify their ideas about the world and how they will (or will not) intervene in and engage with their families, neighbors, communities, and larger society.
—Tessa Lowinske Desmond
My time in Peace Corps helped me see service and civic responsibility as life orientations rather than quantifiable choices of activities. A commitment to service and civic responsibility manifests itself in my life in the opportunities I find to serve my department, my profession, and my community.
—Elizabeth Munz
As a future leader of higher education, I am committed to prizing civically engaged learning, best practices in mentoring, and community-connected teaching.
—Lisa Thornhill
When I complete my dissertation, I will be one of the only enrolled members of a federally recognized tribe with a philosophy PhD and the only American Indian professional applied ethicist in the U.S. In this respect, I have walked a different trail than many other philosophy graduate students ... . I chose to become an applied ethicist because I envisioned myself advancing education on injustice.
—Kyle Whyte
These award winners are the best of the best, but they are also representative of what can be accomplished when scholarly passion, a love of teaching, commitment to the larger social good, hard work, and thoughtfulness combine to create a powerful force for change in the world.