Role Reversal

Alumni Join the Ranks of Extension School Faculty

by Jessica Smith

At the start of each semester, eager students bring empty notebooks and open minds to lecture halls, libraries, and labs, where many nervously meet their professors for the first time. An instructor’s aptitude and passion for teaching can make or break the experience. Extension School students might wonder about credentials. They might question whether instructors remember what it’s like to be in school or, more importantly, if they can appreciate the challenge of being a part-time student with a job and a family.

In several courses, students and instructors have more in common than one might assume: a handful of current faculty members are Extension School alumni. Ranging in experience from a few semesters to more than a decade as Extension faculty, they include Robert Allison, Dianna Doucette, Cynthia Fowler, Maria Garcia, and Joan Weinstein.

Robert Allison

Much like the school’s students, the backgrounds of these alumni are diverse, the paths that led them back to Extension as unique as the subjects they teach. Their styles vary and reflect their own educational experiences, and likely they'd agree with the assessment of Allison that "at the Extension School, you don't teach the subject. You teach the students."

Such a statement reflects the attitude that first led Allison to the profession. A history professor who has taught at the school for 13 years, Allison says he has always been a natural teacher. Years ago, while taking a course at Arizona State University, he frequently met with fellow students to discuss the material and soon realized his peers benefited from the discourse and that he "really enjoyed seeing someone learn something." Allison earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from the Extension School in 1986 and a PhD from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Following the receipt of his doctorate, he learned that the Extension School needed instructors to teach seminars in the social sciences. He proposed a class on Thomas Jefferson and has taught students at his alma mater since 1992. He is also chair of the history department at Suffolk University in Boston.

Maria Garcia

Maria Garcia, a computer science teacher who earned a graduate certificate in 1999 and a Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) in 2002, got her first chance before a class as a teaching assistant for the course Using Databases for Information Management, a course she now teaches. While commuting an hour each way from New Hampshire, Garcia learned that the instructor, Ted Pappadopoulos, was retiring. She accepted the momentous offer to "take over his legacy." This fall will mark her second year. Garcia describes herself as "starting from the bottom" of computer science in 1999 and makes sure that her students understand that "there’s nothing you can tell me that I haven't been through."

Many of Garcia’s students are in her class to learn about computer science for the first time or because knowledge of the subject will help them at work. For Garcia, the most rewarding part of her job is to see current students learn new concepts or hear from former students who are doing well professionally.

Joan Weinstein

Joan Weinstein, who teaches Introduction to Statistics, had an equally serendipitous return to the school where she earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Computer Science in 1989. In 1992, while teaching at Pine Manor College, a small, private women’s college in Chestnut Hill, she came up for tenure. Part of her evaluation required someone from outside Pine Manor to assess her teaching skills. Her Extension School advisor, Paul Vappor, came to observe her class and subsequently offered her a position teaching statistics. Weinstein had less than a week to accept the offer and give her first lecture. She’s been an instructor at the Extension School ever since, earning the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award in 2004.

Weinstein admits that she teaches a subject often viewed as less than glamorous and that most students, at first, do not want to take her class. One initially unenthusiastic former student now attends the University of Michigan and is minoring in statistics, which is proof that Weinstein’s teaching philosophy works. In class she aims to show her students how statistics relates to everyday life instead of having them think, "When am I ever going to need this?"

Weinstein notes that there are parallels between the roles of student and teacher. "My first class as a student was so hard, so rigorous—and so good," she says. "I love teaching. Extension provides me with different, challenging, and rigorous students."

Dianna Doucette

Although the alumni faculty have taken both traditional and nontraditional routes back to their alma mater, they all share a similar passion for teaching. Dianna Doucette, who teaches The Archaeology of New England, graduated from the Certificate in Museum Studies Program in 1990 and subsequently earned a PhD in archaeology from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2003. She has been teaching at Extension since fall 2003.

Doucette’s classes have covered a range of topics in North American archaeology, the subject that she knows best. A lot of her students are in the museum studies program. "They're always a lot of fun," she says. "There’s a different approach for students working all day who also go to school." Although the class schedule doesn't allow time for field excursions, it’s still hands on. She borrows collections of artifacts from the Peabody Museum to share with her students. As a researcher, Doucette thinks it’s easy to "get caught up in what we already know." But in class she encounters fresh questions, which is why she loves teaching so much.

Cynthia Fowler

Doucette’s colleague, Cynthia Fowler, an art history teacher, also relishes interacting with her students and is proud to be part of the faculty. "I wanted to give back to the Extension School what it gave me," says Fowler. In addition to being in her second year teaching at the University, where she earned an ALM in art history in 1995, Fowler is currently a full-time assistant professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Although not an artist herself, she said she enjoys teaching artists because "they love what I'm talking about. They love the material."

Though she holds a PhD from the University of Delaware, Fowler admits that she is constantly challenged by the questions that her students ask. From their questions, she can interpret how much they comprehend. "Sometimes students demonstrate a profound understanding of a work by having a perspective I haven't considered," Fowler says. "I usually encourage them to write a paper on the topic."