2003 DTA for Chris Calvert, Professor of Animal Science
Any student would be forgiven for being reluctant to take a required, upper-division biochemistry course scheduled for eight a.m. in the morning, five days a week. So one UCD undergraduate confessed, until he was introduced to the instructor, Professor Chris Calvert of the Department of Animal Science: “From the very first day I was so drawn into the class that I couldn’t stand to miss it. [Professor Calvert] was the reason I wanted to go. Just to be taught by a man with such knowledge of the material was enough, but he taught it in a way that I had never seen before – he made it interesting, fun, understandable, and informative all at the same time.” Another student recalls that “the electricity he brings into the classroom each morning at 8 a.m. is palpable. In a lecture hall of 200 people, there is rarely a vacant seat…. In my 7+ years of higher education, I have never seen a classroom of undergraduate students give the professor a standing ovation on the last day of class.” Comments such as these are representative of the many superlatives Professor Calvert has garnered over the years for his gifts at making difficult material not only comprehensible but exciting.
Indeed, from Professor Calvert’s record it seems likely that if his students had shouted “encore” on the last day of class, he would have obliged them by giving additional lectures. His teaching workload is usually far higher than what is required of him, which is remarkable considering his noted productivity as a researcher and generous record of service to the campus and profession. According to one of his nominators, himself a past recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Calvert’s student evaluations “read like fan mail.” His student ratings are typically above 4.5 on a 5-point scale, although the evaluations also reflect that his courses are rigorous and challenging. Students at both the graduate and undergraduate level praise him for not only teaching them difficult concepts in an engaging way, but also for teaching them to think critically. One undergraduate wrote “Professor Calvert is inspiring. He motivates and promotes discussion and challenges you to think. His tests really force you to synthesize what you’ve learned and see the ‘big picture’.” Another wrote “I loved biochem because of him. His tests were very reasonable and taught me how to think!”
Professor Calvert inspires students outside of class as well as within by his commitment to getting to know them and to foster their personal and intellectual growth. He is known for his “open-door” policy and concern for every individual student, belying the apparent anonymity of large-enrollment lecture courses. One special-needs student stated “I attributed a majority of my success at UC Davis to the advice, assistance, mediation and mentoring skills of Dr. Calvert. He has helped me to apply problem-solving skills to the UC-Davis environment. Under his guidance I have noticed an increase in my enthusiasm.” Praising his work on behalf of students, the coordinator of the UCD Student Disability Center writes “Whenever I speak of Dr. Calvert, I learn that my experience with him is typical of his work on campus. He is truly an outstanding teacher who has touched the lives of many.”
Current and past students continue to think of Professor Calvert as a mentor whom they hope to emulate. A former student who is now a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell remarked that “Dr. Calvert will always be, to me, a model of the ideal professor – someone who balances the elevated role of the sagacious pedant with a grounded, approachable, entertaining, and likeable persona.” Professor Calvert serves as a model for another former student who is now a Professor: as he recalls, “without a doubt, Dr. Calvert’s contribution both as an instructor and graduate mentor has been instrumental in my career. As I try to pass on what I have learned, Dr. Calvert’s efforts in teaching will have long-lasting effects… I hope that by challenging my own graduate students and striving to create positive mentoring relationships I too will create life-long learners.”
For his outstanding teaching and mentoring – at all times, not just at 8 a.m. – the D.T.A. is pleased to present a 2003 DTA to Professor Chris Calvert.
"Jim is a kick in the pants," wrote one student about the 2001 Summer Field Geology course, GEL 110. This is but one of many enthusiastic reactions to Professor James McClain in the courses he teaches, from the lower-division to the graduate levels in the Department of Geology. Students noted classroom demonstrations ranging from the smashing of a calcite crystal with a sledgehammer in order to illustrate how minerals
fracture into their natural crystalline structure, to displaying samples of a "hot smoker" chimney structure from the ocean floor in order to demonstrate oceanic hydrothermal activity, to playing video and audio tapes of sounds recorded off of the ocean floor by a remotely operated vehicle, and how important these illustrations were in helping them gain an understanding for and appreciation of geology. Such illustrations are not limited to class, and students praised homework assignments such as inspecting cracks in the sidewalk " . . . in order to better understand what an overlapping spreading center on the ocean floor looks like."
Colleagues note that "his students obtain a real-world view of science and its impact on societal problems," and that "he integrates contemporary research problems seamlessly into undergraduate and graduate courses." It would seem that many students agree, as some noted that "one of the recurring themes of Geology 50 is that the earth usually gets the better of people who haven't bothered to learn enough about it," and that his intent is to "teach the students a healthy disrespect for geophysics." Through such activities as take-home essay exam questions that he grades himself some say he instills in a course
for majors the best attributes of a General Education course.
In several of his courses Professor McClain is able to handle the challenge of teaching technical material to a mixed group, including geology majors with "only a modest background in math and physics, as well as to engineering majors, who have a much stronger background in both areas." He consistently receives glowing evaluations from his students at all levels. He is the graduate advisor in the Department, he supervises senior theses, he teaches special summer courses, and he advises MURPPS students. One
student wrote that he "loves questions, answers them thoroughly, and encourages students to ask more questions." Another wrote that he does not teach geology as a collection of known facts but as an observational journey.
Uniform in the comments throughout his classes is praise that he cares about students. For example, one student wrote how he learns about his student's lives and noted how quickly he learned that she played on the lacrosse team and often asked how the team was doing and when the home games were, while another with a wife and two young sons wrote that "he was not only a great teacher, mentor and source of inspiration, but he
was also a friend, concerned about my family's welfare." A group of student nominators wrote that Professor McClain's enthusiasm and teaching skill make him a superior instructor by all of the standard measures, but it is his ability to connect with students at all levels that makes him worthy of special recognition. The DTA committee concurs
with this assessment and is pleased to bestow a 2003 Distinguished Teaching Award on Professor James S. McClain of the Department of Geology.
2003
DTA for Professor James Shackelford
Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
Ceramics and glass are the materials of both engineers and artists, and
it is clear from the letters from his current students, former students, and
colleagues that Professor James Shackelford makes an art of teaching
engineering. He is likely to be found teaching engineering students about the
material properties of ceramics in the morning, and taking his first-year
honors students in the Integrated Studies Program to a ceramics show at an art
gallery in the afternoon. These are the worlds he crosses and integrates,
embodying for his students the model of the teacher who values the broad,
liberal education of the whole person.
As the scientist in the classroom. he literally “wrote the book,” that
is, the definitive textbook, Materials Science, now in its fifth edition
and used in engineering and science classrooms across the country. For nearly
thirty years at Davis, Professor Shackelford has taught materials science to
scores of undergraduate and graduate engineering students, but he also has
taught courses introducing engineering students to larger issues in their
profession. Student evaluations and
letters refer often to the “care” and “caring” he puts into his teaching. Students return repeatedly to the phrase,
“critical thinking.” A former graduate
student, now a researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center, appreciates the way
Professor Shackelford taught him and others to think visually in
“three-dimensional space,” and a current graduate student, who as an
undergraduate received the College of Engineering’s Ghausi Medal, its highest
award, adds that Professor Shackelford can teach these critical thinking skills
even in large lecture classes. Students
appreciate the way he brings classroom knowledge and real world applications
together. In 1996 the American Ceramic Society named him Outstanding Educator
of the Year.
Most distinguished teachers make their impact on students through
classroom teaching, office hour conversations, and the supervision of student
research. Professor Shackelford,
however, also had a hand in improving the undergraduate educational experience
of thousands of engineering students. As Associate Dean in the College of
Engineering for seventeen years, Professor Shackelford was instrumental in
helping create and revise major curricula across the College. At the same time,
he usually taught additional courses as an overload, so committed was he to
having a hand both in the dean’s office and in the everyday dramas of teaching.
One theme through all the letters and testimonials for Professor
Shackelford is his unswerving commitment to mentoring students from
underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds. Students in his undergraduate
classrooms and graduate seminar and laboratories experience this attention and
encouragement, but as Associate Dean he also worked tirelessly on behalf of
programs like MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement), MORE
(Mentorships and Opportunities for Research in Engineering), and the California
Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP), funded by the National Science
Foundation. He helped create and
administer the Capitol Center MESA project that serves five hundred high school
students from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds.
Last year Professor Shackelford accepted a new challenge—the
Directorship of the Integrated Studies Program, the residential honors program
for high achieving first-year students, a unique program now in its 35th
year. He has thrown himself into teaching classes and special studies
opportunities for these students, taking groups to art galleries and openings,
from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to art spaces. From ceramic science
to ceramic art, Professor Shackelford aims to bring the world to his students
and his students to the world. We are pleased to congratulate him as a winner
of 2003 Distinguished Teaching Award, an honor bestowed by the Davis Division
of the Academic Senate in appreciation for his dedication to teaching.
“She taught me that I have the power to accomplish whatever I choose to take on and perhaps that is the best lesson an educator can teach. ...Empowerment is strong, and fostering that in the younger generations is what is needed for a strong, productive future. This is why Professor Tucker is a great educator. ...She has guided me and countless others more than she realizes, but that is what great educators do." These comments by a former undergraduate who went on to graduate study are symptomatic of the impact Susan Tucker, Professor of Chemistry, has had on a cadre of students at UC Davis.
Professor Tucker teaches courses at every level of the Chemistry Department curriculum and she is highly successful at all levels of instruction. One of her nominators, who pointed with pride to the seven other DTA that the Chemistry Department has garnered, noted that Tucker’s student rating of 4.8/5.0 rating for "Overall Evaluation of the Instructor” from nearly 300 Chem 2 students in 1993-94 was “the highest ever in the history of the department.” And this, he marvels from an “audience of notoriously critical freshman” who traditionally give an average of 3.8 to the (other seven DTA) instructors in this course series.
Colleagues laud Tucker’s experimentation with new teaching technology and her ability to interact with her students, even in large classes. As one colleague notes: "Even with 450 students, she will run an open-ended review question and answer session. Her command of the classroom is phenomenal....She is encouraging without losing any rigor."
Students and colleagues alike are impressed with Professor Tucker’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject matter and by her ability to combine intellectual rigor and accessibility. A former undergraduate, who is currently a Ph.D student in physical chemistry at UC Berkeley, remarked that "Few professors impressed me the way Professor Tucker did during my four years at UC Davis. ...A class that I initially took to fulfill my degree requirement became my favorite course and the subject of my current doctoral research. ... Her enthusiasm for physical chemistry led me to explore fields of chemistry which I initially found uninteresting."
Susan Tucker has also distinguished herself as a mentor and as role model to women in the field of Chemistry. According to a former undergraduate research student of Professor Tucker, who is currently a Technical Staff Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, Susan Tucker "played a big role in how I really started to grow as a young scientist. She was my first mentor who happens to be a woman. I saw that she had accomplished a lot in her field as a theoretician, which is not traditionally a field that has been accepting of women as first rate investigators. I saw that she is well respected within the field and that she is doing all of it without having to compromise who she is."
A former undergraduate, currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chemistry at UC Davis had this to say: "Dr. Tucker was more than an instructor, a mentor, and a friend. She was my guide and translator who lead [sic] me through the maze of Greek symbols and countless equation of quantum mechanics and gave me a means to understand them. She was my voice of experience. ... I hope that after I've completed my graduate work and become an instructor that I will be able to leave the same impression that she left on me and others."
For her outstanding teaching and mentoring, we are pleased to present a 2003
DTA to Professor Susan Tucker.
2003 Distinguished
Graduate Mentoring Award
Professor Adel
Kader, Pomology
“To Adel,” writes one of his former students, “there is no self-gain.” Another recalls being impressed by Adel’s “wisdom and humility.” Yet another recalls his kindness and his ability to focus his entire attention onto the student who showed up at his office for advice of one sort or another. This humble selflessness his students and colleagues see in the greatly admired pomologist, Professor Adel A. Kader, is the reigning theme in the enthusiastic letters testifying to the enormous impact Professor Kader has had as a mentor to generations of graduate students at UC Davis. “I was moved to tears,” confesses a junior colleague, “reading some of the letters of support” from former students, present students, and colleagues. Reading these letters, we also recognize the enormous respect, gratitude , and affection felt by people whose university lives have been touched by Professor Kader.
Professor Kader has been the major professor to twenty-four Ph.D. students in his twenty-six years at UC Davis, and clearly he has touched the lives of an even larger circle of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers over these years. Judging by the letterheads on the testimonials from these alumni and colleagues, it is apparent that his students have achieved quite prestigious positions in private industry, government service, and university research. Everyone testifies to Professor Kader’s generosity—his generosity with his time, his generosity with his ideas, and his generosity with his praise of students’ good work. He inspires everyone around him to accomplish their best work, and many have taken his selflessness as a model for passing on to yet other generation of their students the model of a brilliant, modest, generous scholar, teacher, and mentor.
Professor Kader is an internationally known and respected pomologist, with a specialization in the postharvest biology of fruits. But significant for this mentoring award is the fact that (as one alumnus put it) Professor Kader “has used his unique stature and abilities to champion greater involvement of young scientists in professional activities.” He pushes them to present their research at conferences, and he works tirelessly at connecting students with scientists in industry. He “maintains the highest standards of professional conduct and personal ethics,” writes one colleague, “and [he] guides students to emulate such standards.” His integrity inspires others.
Professor Kader also impresses upon students the importance of acquiring and honing their oral and written communication skills, and the letters from alumni recall in great detail the care with which he read and commented on their writing. His weekly journal club is famous among the pomology graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. He is quick to encourage students to submit papers to conferences and journals. A research scientist working in industry recalls being welcomed into Professor Kader’s laboratory circle as an undergraduate and, later, as a graduate student, and she is certain that it was Professor Kader’s careful attention to her writing that has made her career possible. “His door was literally always open,” she remembers, and other alumni recall the same easy access to his advice. In fact, judging from the alumni letters, his “open door“ policy extends beyond his students’ graduation, as they feel free to continue seeking his advice on scientific, professional, and personal career matters.
Especially moving in the testimony for Professor Kader are letters from women scientists expressing appreciation for his encouragement in a profession where women, especially nontraditional students, face an array of discouragements and obstacles. Professor Kader’s mentoring made a world of difference for these women.
As uncomfortable as this Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award might make this modest professor, for whom, indeed, there is no thought of self-gain, we are very pleased to make Dr. Adel A. Kader the center of attention and gratitude felt by all those whose lives he has touched in a quarter century of work and service at UC Davis.
Professor
Karen Watson-Gegeo—School of Education
Anyone reading the dossier presented to the Distinguished Teaching Award Committee
by thirteen of her current and former doctoral students and several of her colleagues in
support of their nomination of Professor Karen Watson-Gegeo for a 2003 Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award quickly understands they have been introduced to a truly extraordinary mentor.
In testimony after testimony Professor Watson-Gegeo’s students bear witness to the powerful influence she has had on their minds, their hearts and their spirits. They speak eloquently of their respect and love for this internationally renowned ethnographer who spends countless hours reading students’ papers and provides meticulously detailed and productive feedback; again and again, they express their appreciation for the genuine interest she takes in them, both as students and as human beings; they laud her intellectual rigor, her political engagement and her gentle kindness; they recognize her efforts to help them network with other members in their respective disciplines, appreciate her willingness to collaborate with them, be it by co-authoring articles, organizing conferences, or establishing reading groups.
Although she is housed in the School of Education, Professor Watson-Gegeo’s main area of research is ethnographer. Her trans- and interdisciplinary approach to ethnography means that, in addition to the students she mentors in the Graduate School of Education, she also attracts and mentors students in numerous other programs across campus. As one of her faculty nominators writes that during the past five years Professor Watson-Gegeo has chaired five completed and is currently advising 12 PhD students in the Education Graduate Group Program. In addition, she has chaired/is chairing six MA or PhD committees in programs in other UC departments and for Ed. D students in the Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. Beyond that she has served as a member on twenty-two other student committees.
Given her intense involvement in graduate education and the large number of students Professor Watson-Gegeo mentors, her dedication to providing personal, individualized and holistic mentoring to her students is all the more praiseworthy. One of her students, the daughter of immigrants from Peru and Cuba, credits Professor Watson-Gegeo for her decision to continue her graduate education. “ At the end of my first year of graduate studies… I resolutely decided to drop out of school. Professor Watson-Gegeo alone stepped forward and encouraged me to stay. And I did; the knowledge that she had faith in me gave me the strength to continue.”
Another one of her nominators astutely observed that: ”She sees us all as whole people, not just students…. My work with Karen over the past four years on my committees and as my mentor has transformed me personally and professionally in the most profound ways.”
Perhaps this assessment by her main nominator best sums up the Watson-Gegeo mentoring karma: “Only the most fortunate students among us find a mentor who inspires us to define our own ‘best work’ then shows us, through sustained and focused effort, how to achieve it. Karen Watson-Gegeo had done this for all of us; she has also taught us that a PhD is more than a ‘union card’ to facilitate entry into the ‘academic industry.’ Under her gentle guidance, we have learned to turn our dreams into programs for research, to pursue them with the utmost rigor and in alignment with a collective movement toward a more humane world. She has treated us like people in this process, offering a warm welcome to us as a diverse group of students in the often intimidating and, for many, demoralizing environment of graduate school. She has empowered us as scholars, researchers, authors, activists and as people. She had done this through an unrelenting and selfless dedication to student mentoring that is probably unique on this campus.”
The DTA Committee concurs with this assessment and is honored to bestow a 2003
Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award on Professor Karen Watson-Gegeo.