May-June 2007

The annual K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award—bestowed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities—recognizes graduate students who show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education, with strong commitments to teaching and learning; to academic and civic responsibility; and to the development of others as leaders, scholars, and citizens.

No doubt in part because of the selection criteria, these students share a number of important characteristics. Here, with their permission, are descriptions of the lives and commitments of the 2007 award winners in their own voices, drawn from the personal statements that accompanied their nomination materials. In them, we see a glimpse of our best hope for our collective future.                         
 —Margaret A. Miller
Change Executive Editor


1. Using what award-winner Kasey Baker calls their “Janus-vision,” they merge their civic work with their academic expertise to serve the community. For several of them, this civic and academic commitment seems to have begun at an early age, leading to an intense engagement with their field.

I grew up in a house where I learned that one’s professional work could make a public contribution. My parents were first in their families to go to college. My mother was one of few women to attend medical school in the 1960s, and for the next 40 years she dedicated her career as a neurologist to serving U.S. veterans. My father found his way into higher education, where his teaching, research, and action outside the classroom have been focused on cultivating social responsibility in businesses, non-profits, and governments. Often, the commitments my parents made in the workplace influenced our life at home. Two examples highlight this:

From the time I was 5 or 6, we were prohibited from eating anything made by Nestlé. All I knew was that our household ban on Nestlé Crunch bars was because “babies were dying in foreign countries.” What I didn’t know then was that my dad, and as a result our family, was participating in an international boycott against Nestlé’s marketing of infant formula in the developing world.

When I was a bit older, we started getting visits at the holidays from George. He was a veteran and, like my family, he was Polish. George would bring us the most wonderful kielbasa and would stay for a short visit, always making sure to thank my mother. As the years went by, George had more and more difficulty walking, and eventually the news came that he had died. In time, I learned that my mother had been much more than George’s doctor. She had been his advocate—working to ensure that he received the medical care he needed so that his final years were just a bit easier.

Perhaps it was because I was at a particularly impressionable age, but these experiences resonated deeply. They taught me that my parents’ job was a part of their personal commitment to making life better for other people. Without really knowing it at the time, my parents modeled how to live out their vocation in service to others and for purposes that enhanced the health and well-being of society.

In graduate school, I began to work with refugee women at the Jane Addams School for Democracy—an intergenerational community school where immigrants and native English speakers study language, prepare for the citizenship test, and develop collective efforts to improve education in the city of St. Paul. My relationships at JAS gave texture to what I was studying in school and have ultimately shaped the focus of my doctoral work. In accompanying women through the naturalization process, I learned directly about the complexity of immigrant life in the United States. Through our efforts to improve education, I also found that my own citizenship was not a static entity but rather a dynamic set of responsibilities to my community and the world around me. On the bridge between the classroom and my organizing work, I found that I could participate in a collective process of democratic change, not just by studying or teaching about public problems, but by actively engaging in civic life.
—Margaret Post


It was in grade school when I first heard the popular slogan “knowledge is power.” As a child growing up in a large working-class family, I saw firsthand that there are many individuals whom policies fail to protect. I knew I wanted to do something with my life that would bring positive change for those who need it. Thus, for my master’s thesis, I examined the effectiveness of sexual-assault-prevention techniques and strategies used by colleges and universities in the United States, in order to see whether these measures actually protected college women from rape. I reported on both the ineffectiveness of these strategies and the possible usefulness of alternative ones, in order to inform university efforts to better protect their students.

Currently, I am examining public perceptions of stalking behavior. Using college students, a sample at great risk of being stalked, I examined whether the gender of the victim and the gender of the offender, as well as the prior relationship between the victim and offender, have an impact on whether a situation is considered to be stalking, considered to be serious, and likely to be taken seriously by practitioners throughout different stages of the criminal-justice process. I also investigated whether these extra-legal variables affect the extent to which the victim is viewed as responsible for his/her victimization.
—Amy Cass


My mother likes to say that leadership is inborn in our family line. This proved a significant challenge to her as in my youth, any leadership potential I had was expressed only through my stubbornly independent spirit and my interest in bossing around my smaller brother. I recognize today that adults channeled this leadership potential into useful expression. My parents and teachers continually encouraged me to “lead by example” by doing my best in all my work. One teacher nominated me for participation in a student-leadership conference, while another encouraged me to apply for admission to a statewide summer science program. Most significantly, though, Girl Scout leaders seemed to intuit that while my introverted personality was challenged by our troop of gossipy girls and that badges meant little to me, I would enjoy the culminating experience needed to earn the Gold Award.

They were correct. The experience, which involved coordinating an appreciation dinner for local homeless-shelter volunteers, was seminal. It was the first event that I had organized with a team and the first where I experienced the intrinsic rewards of volunteerism. I discovered, too, that logistical organization, delegation, and public speaking were skills that I enjoyed using.
—Sarah Wise


In August 2002, I was well on my way to becoming a serious researcher in the area of theoretical computer science. I had recently graduated with highest honors from the College of Charleston, where I had earned undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and computer science. Additionally, I had already been involved in several research projects and had had a few papers accepted for publication. I arrived at the University of Georgia with a research assistantship in hand, and I was excited to begin my graduate-school career. That month, however, two things happened that would change my life.

The first was that the modem in my computer failed.

I had purchased the modem less than two weeks earlier, so my first instinct was to return it to the retail store that sold it to me. I arrived at the customer-service counter, where one of the computer technicians came over to help me. I explained the situation to him—the modem had just stopped working.

Without even examining the modem, the technician claimed that the failure was the result of a power surge. Asking no questions, he explained that this situation was not covered under the 30-day return policy, because I did not have the modem connected to a surge protector. Finally, he offered to sell me a surge protector so that my next modem wouldn’t be damaged.

I explained to the computer technician that lightning storms were usually the cause of power surges and that there had been no storms in the area since I had been using the modem. I also asked him how he could tell that the modem failure was caused by a power surge without testing or examining it. He turned the modem over and showed me some places where he claimed that the modem had melted due to the surge, just as he had suspected. I replied that, in fact, he was pointing to a type of gel that is used to bond parts of circuit boards and that the modem had not melted.

Clearly the technician had not been prepared to discuss the issue with someone who was knowledgeable about computers, and he decided at this point to end the discussion. Annoyed, he explained to me that it was his decision, he was not going to exchange the modem because he knew that the failure was due to a power surge, and that such an incident was not covered by the warranty. Furthermore, he reiterated that it was my fault for not having it attached to a surge protector.

I left the store feeling defeated but knowing that I had other options. I was fairly certain that if I contacted the modem manufacturer and explained the situation, they would ship me a new modem. Indeed, this is exactly what transpired. The more I thought about the situation, however, the angrier I got. I suspected that this technician had probably taken advantage of many people who were not aware that they had other options.

As I talked to others about the incident, I realized that this situation is all too common. It seems that technical people and tech-oriented retailers perpetuate a myth that computers are difficult to understand and that a person needs a significant amount of specialized knowledge in order to maintain, upgrade, and troubleshoot them. Making the public believe this is in the company’s best interest, as it secures them a steady stream of revenue. I realized that, as a computer scientist, I had a responsibility to society to subvert this myth.

That same month a second life-altering event occurred that gave me an opportunity to do exactly that—my research assistantship fell through and was replaced with a teaching assistantship. In my new role, I had the opportunity to spend the next several years as the instructor of record for introductory computer-science classes, and I took this as the opportunity to spread my newfound sense of social responsibility. In doing so, I slowly began to realize that teaching was the most rewarding activity in which I have ever engaged. I found that the dissemination of knowledge is a challenge in itself, and I came to realize that teaching is one of the few endeavors that allow a human to have a positive, lasting impact on society and culture. I brought up relevant computer-related social issues in the classroom and explained to new computer-science majors that it was insufficient for us to simply understand computers and technology; we must go beyond that and teach others about them as well.
—Tarsem Purewal, Jr.


2. They have a calling to teach and mentor, inside and outside of the university, and have prepared themselves to do so well.

Even as an undergraduate at Florida State University, I mentored other undergraduate students by advising and counseling them on their academic coursework, employment opportunities, student organizations, and graduation requirements. Also, I have been heavily involved in the mentoring of at-risk populations. I have been affiliated with the Foundation for Adolescent Mentoring and Education, in which I assisted in after-school activities and tutoring of youth who have had conflicts with the law. Additionally, I have implemented programs and activities at Bear Hill 4-H Camp designed to teach teamwork and true friendship to underprivileged teenage girls. I have also voluntarily mentored many segments of the incarcerated population by instructing GED classes and assisting in group-therapy sessions for male offenders.
Currently, I volunteer as a mentor at a woman’s correctional institution, where I meet each week with a group of offenders to discuss topics such as depression, body image, domestic and sexual violence, and anger management. These women are close to release and need guidance and knowledge to return to the community with the hope of living safe and productive lives. I recently discovered that my commitments to the prison population could be united with my commitments to undergraduate teaching through a new service-learning technique known as the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.

To enhance my teaching and commitment to learning, I have attended numerous teaching seminars and workshops on campus and have completed a year-long higher education teaching-certification program that required four courses, a classroom observation, and the development of a teaching portfolio. These experiences made me truly reflect on and refine my teaching. But although these seminars are valuable resources, it is the desire to make my students functioning and contributing members of society that guides me most in the development and improvement of my courses.
 —Amy Cass


I had several opportunities to become involved with teaching teachers during my graduate-school career, particularly through the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP) at the University of Colorado. I began by developing a workshop for beginning teaching assistants for the GTP’s teacher-education program. Finding the experience rewarding, I applied for the GTP’s Lead Graduate Teacher position for our department. In this role, I took responsibility for leading multiple workshops for beginning teaching assistants in our department and mentoring their teaching throughout their first year. I received explicit leadership training from the Graduate Teacher Program in preparation for this work, along with the message that I was expected to become an advocate for good teaching practices in my future career—a mantle I assumed with enthusiasm.
—Sarah Wise


3. Their teaching is aimed at a larger purpose, whether social or developmental.


I view each new semester as an opportunity to improve the course and my instruction and have sought out teaching evaluation and advice from peers, professors, and campus instructional counselors. My larger goal as an instructor is to create knowledgeable, skilled, and responsible citizens in order to support lifelong civic development. My sociology of community course is designed to inspire ongoing dialogue about achieving the difficult balance between individual and communal concerns.

For example, in this summer’s class, we wrestled with the difficult task of crafting recommendations for rebuilding a less race- and class-segregated New Orleans. To empower students to participate in solving collective problems, I send them out of the classroom into the surrounding community. In one project, students partner with a local community organization and create, write, and present a project proposal that addresses some of the key community concerns they identify. My teaching practices are guided by the belief that if students experience the relevance of sociology to their own lives and are willing to take the risks associated with critically thinking about societal implications, they are better equipped for civic participation.

David Blouin, Bernice Pescosolido, and I won a research grant for scholarship on teaching and learning from Indiana University Instructional Services to investigate community-based organizations’ experiences with service-learning students. One of the major selling points of service-learning courses is their potential to mutually benefit communities and universities. Although a great deal of research reports numerous pedagogical and personal benefits for students—from improved grades and increased civic engagement to increased understanding and appreciation of diversity—there is relatively little research on the impact of service-learning on the community. To understand when and how service-learning classes benefit the community, we conducted in-depth interviews with representatives of local community organizations that have worked with Indiana University service-learning students.

This is not research for research’s sake. Our work is driven by the belief that mutually beneficial partnerships enhance the experiences of service-learners and have the potential to strengthen community-university relations. We have therefore used what we have learned to develop practical guidelines for instructors in any discipline who seek to create successful service-learning partnerships with community organizations. We have sought out appropriate venues in which to share our results with fellow scholars and instructors. We will be presenting our research at the International Service-Learning Research Conference this fall and at an Indiana University Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Speaker Series next spring. We are also currently preparing an article for submission to Teaching Sociology and hope to organize a service-learning workshop as part of the local Nonprofit Alliance’s Continuing Education for Nonprofits series.
—Evelyn Perry

My fourth year of graduate school was challenging for me. It was my third and final year of support on a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellowship, but I greatly missed teaching. In the lab I was tackling several technical obstacles, which made for glacial progress. That spring, I attended a lecture on the outreach work of an historian on campus, Dr. Patty Limerick. She described how she was able to deliver clear factual information in a way that allowed warring factions to discuss controversial topics such as water rights in the West. I began to think of my own research focus, evolutionary biology. Who was playing Patty’s role in the controversy over the teaching of evolution?

Up to this point, I had considered making a contribution to the controversy over evolution only when I was established in my career and less vulnerable to attack. Patty’s lecture inspired me to delay involvement no longer. I immediately felt a renewed sense of purpose for my involvement in research and a sense of promise for my future as an academic.

I had been seeking support for my fifth year of graduate school, and I realized that a fellowship offered by the Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education program (GK12) might enable me to pursue advocacy for the teaching of evolution. My involvement in the program might delay my graduation date by up to a year, but I decided to risk this penalty for the opportunity to bring my experiences teaching students and teachers full circle, with a focus on teaching evolution.

GK12 fellowship support allowed me to institute change at three levels. First, I worked in the summers of 2005 and 2006 to coordinate two outreach events for educators on the topic of teaching evolution. Second, during the school year I worked with a teacher to implement an evolution curriculum for the first time in her 11-year career. Finally, through the outreach events I developed a local network of educators, graduate students, and academics who continue to organize events around the teaching
of evolution.
—Sarah Wise


In the Platonic dialogue on Protagoras, Socrates relates an interesting story to his friend. Hippocrates wakes him early in the morning, asking that Socrates introduce him to Protagoras, who has recently arrived in town. Socrates replies, “It is your present intention to go to Protagoras and pay him money as a fee on your behalf. Now whom do you think you are going to, and what will he make of you?” At issue here is paideia, teaching or training for “mental culture.” When Hippocrates later asks Protagoras about his pedagogical goals, Protagoras responds, “Young man, if you come to me, your gain will be this. The very day you join me, you will go home a better man, and the same the next day. Each day you will make progress toward a better state.” Throughout the rest of the dialogue, Protagoras and Socrates debate the relation between wisdom and virtue and whether anyone can teach virtue. (For further discussion, see Janet Atwill's "Rhetoric and Civic Virtue" in The Vitality of the Rhetorical Tradition).

In many ways, we are still debating the same issue. What is the purpose of a university education? When I teach a class, am I teaching a form of cultural virtue? Do I train citizens? I often start my 100- and 200-level classes with this story and ask my students whether they have come to the class to learn a skill or to become better people. They generally answer the same way: Reading and writing make them better people. I was very surprised when I first heard them respond overwhelmingly that, in fact, they expected me to teach a form of civic virtue that would persist throughout their lives. Although they may take a mercenary approach to credit accumulation, they apparently agree with Protagoras. They expect to go home in a “better state.”

This has always been my goal in teaching. I do not necessarily approach a class with virtue in mind, but I do employ liberatory pedagogies, and I believe that
creating curiosity, instilling academic rigor, and encouraging diversity frees and enables students to exercise independent thought and expression.

My most challenging experiences in my four years teaching at the university level include teaching English courses to military personnel, tutoring Alaskan rural students in writing, working closely with university athletes, and teaching Women’s Studies courses in a conservative city. When I lived in Alaska, near an Army base and an Air Force post, I taught nine literature and composition courses, primarily to military personnel. I taught groups of soldiers and airpersons of different genders, races, sexual orientations, and class backgrounds, while negotiating the hetero-masculinist and sometimes racist military rhetoric that prevailed just after the beginning of the Iraq War. Making this even more difficult, these students represented a variety of military ranks and had been told not to interact informally or disagree publicly with those of a higher rank.

In working with Alaskan rural students, for whom university education often means breaking with their traditions, and with a group of student athletes who were mostly first-generation college students, I realized that culturally, much was at stake for these students in gaining a new academic perspective. Teaching Women’s Studies classes at the University of Tennessee means that I work with students who have never openly discussed equality in terms of gender and sexual orientation. I find myself drawn to these teaching situations, where the cultural stakes are high.
—Kasey Baker


I was able to develop my skills further as a teaching fellow for a graduate course in community organizing at the Kennedy School of Government with Marshall Ganz. After each class session, our teaching team had intensive, structured conversations about our development as teachers. We debriefed what went well and what could have gone differently. We pushed each other to articulate learning goals for the class and for each of our students. I learned to examine how I could have challenged or nurtured a student differently to facilitate more growth in his or her learning.

The feedback from Marshall and the team, as well as our shared reflections about pedagogy, informed my practice and strengthened my ability to integrate my experiences as an organizer with my approach to teaching. Most importantly, I realized that through teaching, I could make a contribution to the public good by fostering the civic leadership of young people.

At the heart of being an educator and organizer is my desire to build bridges between academic life and democratic practice.
—Margaret Post


4. Their work has been collaborative and interdisciplinary.


After serving as the graduate assistant in my university’s Preparing Future Faculty program for two years, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship with Project STEP (the Science and Technology Enhancement Program) at the University of Cincinnati. Project STEP involves a collaborative effort by the College of Engineering and the College of Education to take engineering and science graduate students into the Cincinnati public schools. As a fellow, I had various responsibilities, including developing and implementing hands-on, inquiry-based science and math activities, disseminating Project STEP activities and experiences (through publications, presentations, and workshops), and being a resource for the teachers and students at the school to which I was assigned.

My experience with this project has given me invaluable exposure to the kindergarten through 12th-grade (K-12) education system. I learned how the different components of the system—students, teachers, administrators, parents, and policies—affect the process of learning. I have been exposed to the many hurdles that students and teachers, especially in urban school districts, have to overcome when they are faced with a variety of issues that stand in the way of education.

Perhaps the most significant impact of my fellowship was the process of learning to be an effective collaborator with K-12 teachers, faculty members, and graduate students from various disciplines.
—Bethany Bowling


With my interest in curricular development and changes in academe, the chair of the Department of Dance asked me to design an online course for our department, Dance, Gender, and Culture. This course, the second online course offered by our department, is cross-listed with women’s studies and fulfills a core-curriculum requirement in fine arts or women’s studies for the students in our university. In this course, we explore the aesthetics of dance in relation to social issues in different times and cultural contexts. We focus on how the representations of bodies and our personal judgments of them in popular culture have led to stereotypes and the marginalization of groups of people throughout history. For example, last year we read about and viewed work performed by dance companies that employ both disabled and non-disabled dancers.

This lesson became one of the most poignant moments of the semester. During our discussions, the students openly admitted that their narrow and exclusionary views of physicality and disability were partially due to the ways in which disability is socially and culturally constructed in the U.S. They also shared how the course material throughout the semester helped transform their views of disability and developed a deeper awareness of social issues such as racism, classism, and sexism. By interrogating our visual biases and how they contribute to how we function as citizens, I hope that I have encouraged my students to think beyond the curriculum and that they have learned the importance of critical thinking and how it contributes to our perspective on the world around us.
—Stephanie Milling-Robbins


5. They are planning to become public intellectuals.

I understand my future responsibilities as a faculty member to include not only research, teaching, and service, but also public scholarship. Scholarly activity that contributes to public purposes takes many forms, but, at its best, integrates learning and engagement. For example, I was a member of a research team (the College Student Social Life Study) that used what we learned from our fieldwork and interviews to inform university residential-life policies in an effort to reduce rates of sexual assault on campus.

Although public scholarship is, to my mind, a professional obligation, few graduate students receive training for this component of their future careers as faculty. In response to this deficit in graduate training, I collaborated with fellow sociology graduate students to form the Social Action League, a group dedicated to developing our research and teaching skills to help address social problems on local, national and global levels, as well as to facilitate the civic development of our students.
—Evelyn Perry

These young people are our students, but they are also our teachers.


View the 2007 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award Winners