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Taking the Classroom to Marine Science

Crowder earns the University Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award

Larry Crowder takes students on one of his many marine biology field trips.

Disappearing species? Dwindling marine populations? Larry Crowder, whose scholarship in marine science generates alarming insights into major global changes, also has other fish to fry: Teaching the next generation to care about life aquatic.

His skill and enthusiasm as a teacher have earned him Duke's University Scholar-Teacher of the Year award, given by the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, for 2008. The Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology, who joined Duke's Beaufort-based Marine Laboratory in 1995, finds classroom life deeply rewarding and is happy to talk about why.

Crowder teaches both undergraduates and graduate students such topics as Marine Megafauna, Sea Turtle Biology & Conservation, and (with cultural anthropologist Mike Orbach), Conservation Biology and Policy.

A self-confessed "change junkie," Crowder funnels the newest discoveries about marine science into the curriculum to give students fresh insights into ocean life. He jests, "I like teaching and I'm stupid, so I invent courses."

Marine Megafauna arose from his desire to interest a range of undergraduates in ocean ecology and population dynamics. Field trips take students to the coast for close-up encounters with their subjects. "When people see and touch things, they remember in ways they can't when they only read or hear about it," Crowder says.

Even students of religion and philosophy take the course -- which, he says, "makes the class very fun. To have students from a variety of disciplines motivates discussion."

Teaching runs in the Crowder family. Raised in central California, Crowder recalls his Grade 7 science teacher as "just phenomenal -- he was kind of mean to us, but I learned more in that class than any other." Briefly sidetracked at California State University Fresno by advice to study engineering, Crowder found he was more excited in biology.

He recalls, "I began thinking about teaching at the university level because I thought, ‘You can teach something you're excited about and not have to do discipline.'"

Crowder double-majored in biology and math and earned his doctorate at Michigan State Univerity, with post-doctoral training at the University of Wisconsin. He looks back on his years in the upper Midwest as, "the period during which I froze most of the time."

Crowder returned to warmer climes by joining the zoology department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1982; by the time Duke approached him, he also was affiliated with the NCSU departments of botany and biomathematics.

Now the specialist in marine ecology studies endangered species and fisheries conflicts, with a focus on international policy. Says Crowder, "My mantra at the graduate level is ‘interdisciplinary and international.' If you want to be effective solving programs in the real world, you have to understand sociological, legal and governmental perspectives. And an international approach is essential because two-thirds of the oceans are outside exclusive national zones."

He attributes his teaching award to a creative approach: "It's similar to being an artist or a choreographer," he says. "You have to communicate what you know. People who are excited about what they do share it with their students and it rubs off."

Excitement, he says, leads people to engagement. Says Crowder, "I would be thrilled to have a doctor, a lawyer, a politician who understands the environment and cares about it. The goal isn't recruiting people to do what I do; the goal is recruiting people who can do great things for the oceans."

Crowder was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier this year. His research on loggerhead turtles has been valuable to researchers studying that threatened species. He admits to some success in research, but he claims, "It was an interest in teaching that got me where I am."