It is my great pleasure to announce two recipients of the 2016-2017 Siegel Teaching Prize: Grace Kim and Ashawari Chaudhuri. This award was established in 2006 by STS, with generous support from the Siegel Family, to recognize HASTS graduate students who excel in their work as teaching assistants. This year’s Siegel Teaching Prize honors Grace’s work this spring in 21H.132 (The Ancient World: Rome), supervised by Prof. Will Broadhead, and Ashawari’s, also in spring term, in STS.006J/24.06J (Bioethics), supervised by Prof. Robin Scheffler. The prize committee, Rosalind Williams and William Deringer, prepared the following prize citation:
"Both Grace and Ashawari are fifth-year students in the HASTS Program, and both have previously served two other semesters as a TA. This year, they both performed superlatively while taking on demanding and unfamiliar subject matter—a key challenge faced by many HASTS teaching assistants, given the wide diversity of topics and approaches covered under the History-Anthropology-STS umbrella. Grace, whose previous teaching experience came in STS and Anthropology subjects, was assigned to a History subject that focuses on the Roman world from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD, with particular attention to close reading and analysis of difficult ancient texts. Ashawari, having previously taught two Anthropology subjects, was asked to take on a Bioethics subject co-taught by instructors in STS and Philosophy. In order to adapt, she taught herself a mini-course in ethics during the semester. The success of their efforts may be measured by student evaluations of the extent to which they “displayed thorough knowledge of subject material”: students gave them scores of 6.6 and 6.7 (out of 7). Prof. Broadhead’s comments about Grace are indicative of the considerable pedagogical and scholarly achievement this entailed: “It was clear her students trusted her, not only as a supportive TA, but as a Roman historian(!).” Both recipients were also assisting communication-intensive subjects, which involved supporting students through the writing of four papers, including thorough revisions. This is a time-consuming responsibility; furthermore, giving students useful feedback demands a lot of thought and tact, since communication skills involve motivation as much as mechanics. Grace and Ashawari were praised by professors and students alike for the time and care they put into communications instruction, meeting frequently and in many cases multiple times with individual students. Communication-intensive classes tend to draw from first- and second-year students, so many in the class were encountering their first humanities and social sciences subjects at MIT. This fact can make it difficult to generate recitation discussions, but students in both classes highly praised their TAs for their skill in doing this. One of Grace’s students commented, “The class discussion environment you facilitated was very comfortable and made participating really easy and fun. I think you posed a lot of good questions and helped us to also explore our own questions about the readings.” One of Ashawari’s students praised her for doing a “great job of encouraging discussion and thought. Great recitation leader.” Other students praised the discussions for being “interactive,” “student based,” and “awesome.” Ashawari also met frequently with other TAs assigned to the class, who were less experienced in leading recitations and who benefitted from her coaching. As is usual with HASTS TA’s, Grace and Ashawari were asked to give one lecture introducing their own research and reflecting on how it relates to the class subject matter. According to Prof. Broadhead, Grace’s presentation introducing the students to the conservation of historical artifacts and to her own doctoral research on new conservation technologies convinced him that “Grace is a natural teacher who will thrive in any teaching context.” With similar enthusiasm, Prof. Scheffler praised Ashawari for her “lucid” guest lecture on the ethical implications of modern “risk society.” “The students were very engaged by the lecture, and I was impressed at the degree to which she was able to move from the historical to the ethical implications of risk so seamlessly.” The STS Program is pleased to award the 2016-17 Siegel Teaching Prize to Grace Kim and Ashawari Chaudhuri for excellence in teaching. We are proud to have graduate students who take their teaching responsibilities so seriously, perform them so well, and regard this experience as an essential part of their own professional education." Please join me in congratulating Grace and Ashawari for this much-deserved honor. I am also grateful to Roz and Will for serving on the prize committee. Jen Jennifer S. Light Department Head and Professor of Science, Technology and Society Professor of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., E51-173 Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 452-2390 http://sts-program.mit.edu/people/sts-faculty/jennifer-s-light/
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