Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching

Overview

The Metcalf Awards are given annually to one or more finalists in the competition for the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching. The winners of the Metcalf Awards each receive $5,000.

“The Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching express Boston University’s understanding of the centrality of teaching in higher education,” President Emeritus Jon Westling has stated.

“A university is many things: an active tradition of inquiry, attentiveness, respect for the past and the future, a struggle to comprehend the world and the ideas we have of it, and a community defined by its open-ended debates.”

Teaching is what elevates and unifies these diverse elements and brings them directly into the lives of students. By recognizing and encouraging outstanding teaching, the Metcalf Awards express Boston University’s deepest purpose.

Each fall, the Metcalf Committee invites students, faculty members, and alumni to submit letters recommending current full-time faculty members for consideration for the Metcalf Awards.

2012 Metcalf Award Recipients

Marisa Milanese

College of Arts & Sciences, Writing

Milanese, who is also curriculum coordinator and a mentor to fellow writing faculty (the program is home to more than 100 faculty, tutors, and staff), is the winner of one of this year’s two Metcalf Awards for Excellence in Teaching, announced May 3 at the Senior Breakfast.

Citing her “irrepressible enthusiasm” for teaching a required course, program director Joseph Bizup, a CAS associate professor, refers to her as “a shining star” on the writing faculty, who “illuminates everything around her.” She has earned a reputation not just as a gifted teacher, but as a caring mentor, generous colleague, and asset to the community with her outreach work for English High School and the educational initiative Success Boston, a program designed to double the college completion rate for Boston public school students.

In her seven years at BU, Milanese has elevated the writing class, sometimes referred to casually as “freshman comp,” to one that captivates students from aspiring poets who mastered AP English to those majoring in mechanical engineering or hospitality administration, from students who already love to write to those who, she says, “never want to write anything more than an email.” Milanese has to hook all of them. “I’m teaching a skill that not all of them understand or appreciate the relevance of,” she says. “I have to explain the assignments and their broader relevance.” Her main goal is “to transform students’ understanding of the writing process” and give them skills “that are broadly applicable to their careers at BU and beyond.” The idea of freshman composition “can feel a little remedial. But that’s not the way we teach our courses; they are very engaging, challenging seminars.”

Robert Lowe

Medical School, Gastroenterology

Lowe, or “Doc,” as he prefers to be called, stresses the importance of empathy in medicine. He’s read the studies showing that medical students’ idealism dulls as they are exposed to the mental and emotional stresses inherent in medical school. He tries to counteract that by paying careful attention to how students talk or act in front of patients, leading by example and letting them know that even the smallest things they say or do may have huge impacts.

“There’s always been a tendency in medicine to tell students to dissociate themselves emotionally in order to maintain a certain calm,” he says. “But it’s a balancing act. You have to actually feel the emotions and control them. Getting rid of the emotions does not help. Patients do not appreciate unemotional doctors.”

Lowe has been cited for his skill as a physician as well as for his teaching. He has been named one of Boston’s Top Doctors three times by Boston magazine, most recently this year. Not surprisingly, he loves being a doctor.

“It allows you to actually help people as part of your daily life,” he says. “Many jobs in the world involve you succeeding at the expense of someone else. You win; they lose. You get something; someone else gives something. Here it’s not like that. Everybody wins and loses together essentially.”

His students’ admiration and respect for his devotion to medicine and teaching come across clearly in their letters recommending Lowe for a Metcalf award. “Dr. Lowe is awesome—he makes you marvel at the physiology of the GI tract!” wrote one. “He is an effective, compassionate, and knowledgeable physician,” said another. “He demonstrates how empathy itself can be healing,” from yet another. And last, but not least: “He is exactly the kind of physician I would hope to be in a few years.”

• Past Awardees