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A Tradition of Teaching and Mentoring

Duke graduates are making their mark in Duke's classrooms

Duke teaching and mentoring award winners Thomas Robisheaux, Linda Orr and Stephen Craig

Stephen Craig was so excited to teach his first chemistry class at Duke, he could barely sleep the night before.

It didn't take long for others to notice his enthusiasm: during the middle of his first lecture, when energetically making a point, one of Craig's lace-less shoes flew off his foot and skidded across the back of the classroom.

Six years later, Craig is still excited about teaching chemistry students, which is one reason why he is the recipient of one of the 2006 Trinity College teaching awards.

Receiving a teaching award is particularly rewarding for Craig, a 1991 Duke graduate, because he can relate to what his students are going through -– both academically and in other areas of their lives.

Coincidentally, a second teaching award winner this year -- associate history professor Thomas Robisheaux -- is also a Duke graduate, as is Linda Orr, one winner of this year's Graduate School mentoring award.

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2005 arts & sciences teaching award winners.

According to many of his students, Craig expects a lot from them, especially when it relates to developing their critical problem-solving skills.

"I'm not pushy. The students make their own [academic] decisions. But I think we as faculty are obliged to set the bar as high as possible and stress that they can answer hard questions," Craig said.

Students and colleagues of Craig's describe him as creative and able to take a complicated subject -– organic chemistry -- and break it down to its simplest form.

"Once this is accomplished and understood, you begin to see the world differently," Craig said of his subject matter. "Years after you take the course, you should still feel the effects."

Craig, whose father taught chemistry at Lenoir-Rhyne College and whose mother taught nursing, said he knew as early as his freshman year that he wanted to work in chemistry.

"I knew I wanted to not only do research, but also share the knowledge," he said.

For Linda Orr, it was a different tale.

During her junior year at Duke in 1964, she still had no idea what was in store for her after graduation. "I was totally stymied and I knew I wasn't going to get married," she said.

She said it was her French professor, Richard Grant, who encouraged her to think about becoming a teacher.

Orr is known for encouraging her students to be creative in the class. In her French literature course, for instance, she challenges her students to bring in their iPods to sing along and lip-synch to French hip-hop songs.

Quoting her colleague Margaret Greer, chair of the Department of Romance Studies, Orr said, "There's nothing like a high out of coming out of a class that has gone well."

Orr said her goal is to help her students learn and succeed, which is why, during her 35-year teaching career, she has occasionally altered her teaching style.

"The world changes massively, and students change. You must adapt to that. It's very different from when I was a student here," said Orr, the winner of the Graduate School's Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring.

Robisheaux, like Craig a recipient of a Trinity College Teaching Award, remembers exactly when and where he was when he decided to go into history.

That moment came while Robisheaux was a Duke undergraduate and was traveling on a bus in Munich, Germany, in September 1972. The summer Olympic Games were underway, and 11 Israeli athletes were being held hostage – and later killed -- by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September.

"I can remember that the whole city was under lockdown and that the bus that I was on was one of the only ones to be let in the city," said Robisheaux, who was part of a year-long study abroad program in Munich.

"Many people didn't realize that they were walking in the same streets where an historical event had occurred."

But Robisheaux did, and his future as a historian was cemented.

In his "Magic, Religion and Science since the Renaissance" course, Robisheaux introduces his students to the ways that magic, religion and science have been inter-related in the past, and how those beliefs, theories and science conflict or complement each other today.

"I try to get close with the students so that they can be engaged in the course material," he said. "There are times when serious topics are discussed, and it's not intimidating for them."

A reward for Robisheaux comes when his students respond to his challenges; for instance, when Robisheaux was teaching about the life of Galileo, his students decided to perform a scene from Bertolt Brecht's play about the scientist-astronomer.

Robisheaux credits three of his undergraduate history professors -- Seymour Mauskopft, Ronald Witt and Jack Cell, who died in 2001 -- for pushing him to do his best and to articulate his own views about history.

"They showed me how to make my work more clear and concise, and I pass that lesson on to my own students today," he said.

In addition to Robisheaux and Craig, teaching awards this year were also presented to Michele Strano, a Mellon lecturer in the University Writing Program; to Professor Sonke Johnsen, Department of Biology, who received the Robert B. Cox Teaching Award; and Professor Jehanne Gheith, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, who received the Richard K. Lublin Teaching Award.