Pairing Up to Prepare Tomorrow’s Professors

Pedagogy Fellow program brings graduate and postdoctoral students together with experienced faculty to teach classes

By Chelsea Feinstein

Adam Sweeting and Megan LeBarron have found that their conversations while walking back to the CGS building after the course they cotaught in the spring of 2023 were some of their most rewarding.

Sweeting, an associate professor of humanities, and LeBarron, who recently received a PhD in American and New England studies from BU, teamed up to teach Literature and Art from the Ancient World to the Enlightenment as part of the Pedagogy Fellow program at CGS. The program, which has operated through the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning (CITL) at CGS since 2012, pairs graduate and postdoctoral students with faculty to give them valuable, hands-on teaching experience while they prepare to search for full-time jobs.

“Those were the moments where we talked about how lectures went, how we were going to frame something for discussion,” says LeBarron (GRS’23,’23). “Even though we’re only in class 9 or 10 hours a week, we’re never not talking about students or thinking about what they’re getting out of the class. That’s really energizing for me.”

Adam Sweeting, left, an associate professor of humanities, and Megan LeBarron (GRS’23), who recently received a PhD in American studies from BU and is pictured here with her daughter, were paired up through the College of General Studies’ Pedagogy Fellow program, which aims to provide graduate and postdoctoral students with valuable, hands-on teaching experience. Photos courtesy of Adam Sweeting and Megan LeBarron

This marked Sweeting’s first experience with the Pedagogy Fellow program. “I think it’s really good for a veteran teacher like myself,” he says. “I’ve been in the classroom now at CGS for a quarter century, and it’s easy to sort of settle into a routine. That’s not healthy. Just talking with Megan has improved my instruction, I think. I’ve learned a lot from her.”

Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, former associate dean for faculty research and development and director of CITL, says the program prepares students to teach the broad-based survey courses that most new faculty are hired to instruct after they complete graduate school. “The Pedagogy Fellow program makes them more competitive in the very tough job markets that exist in academia today,” she says.

Sweeting and LeBarron worked collaboratively throughout the semester. While Sweeting designed the syllabus and delivered most lectures, LeBarron led one week’s lecture, cotaught discussion sections, held additional office hours, and worked with Sweeting to design impactful assignments for students.

Among the pedagogical challenges the pair faced was how to handle the growing presence of artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT in the classroom. Their response was to focus on designing assignments that forced students to get specific.

For one assignment called HU 103 in the World, they sent students out into the city, searching the Museum of Fine Arts or the Harvard Art Museum to find a work that engages with similar themes to those they studied in class. Students then had to submit a video and an essay comparing the texts.

One student drew parallels between the art of African American potters in South Carolina on display at the MFA and that of Renaissance-era Italian women, citing the challenges both faced in getting their art to be recognized. In another interpretation of the assignment, a pair of students visited the Harvard Art Museum’s collection of Buddhist art to prepare a video and essay comparing representations of the divine in China with similar ideas in HU 103 texts such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and the lyric poems of Sappho.

“Being a Pedagogy Fellow has shown me in really concrete ways that the kind of life I imagined with a PhD—being at a university, doing intellectual work, and making meaningful connections with people—is fully possible,” LeBarron says.

This fall, LeBarron will join the Office of Student Excellence at Cleveland State University as a success/graduation coach. “It’s a great opportunity in my hometown to guide first-gen college students and graduates of the Cleveland public schools through their college careers,” she says. “I’ll definitely draw on my CGS experience to advise a cohort of 60 students and develop engaging programming to support their academic and social lives on campus.”

Sweeting says he would recommend the program to other faculty members for its positive effect on everyone involved—the graduate student, the faculty member, and the undergraduates in the classroom.

“I think this is a model program for CGS. Teaching is at the heart of what we do at CGS,” he says. “It’s really been one of the highlights of my career at CGS. It’s been so enriching.”