AYSPS Excellence in Teaching Award 2009
The Andrew Young School is pleased to announce the recipients for the 2009 AYS Excellence in Teaching Award: Professor of Public Management & Policy Gregory B. Lewis (top) and Associate Professor of Economics Bruce A. Seaman (bottom). While both professors are noted for their outstanding student evaluations, it is their unique philosophies regarding teaching and classroom presence that set them apart from their peers.
Lewis’s goal in teaching statistics is to actively involve all students and convince them that statistics is a powerful tool for answering questions and addressing problems. In order to accomplish this, Lewis learns all of his students names the first day of class and actively engages them using real world examples – attitudes toward sex, abortion, capital punishment, and government spending, and race and gender differences in federal career success - in class, on homework assignments, and on quizzes and exams.
Lewis’s teaching prowess is reflected in the adoption of his lecture notes by other faculty and graduate students in their teaching duties as well as graduates requesting to use them at their new Universities. In the future, Lewis intends to publish his lecture notes as a textbook.
Seaman describes his role as a professor as “one of being a critical input into the learning production function, one that serves to increase the productivity of the student’s own inputs, and perhaps more importantly, to convince students via one’s own enthusiasm and coherency that it is worth any commitment of those 'own resources' at all”.
One of underlying themes across the variety of courses that Seaman leads (from undergraduate to doctoral) is his passion to demonstrate that economics is a useful way of thinking about important problems. This is reflected in his consulting work with law firms, governmental agencies, and research think tanks in areas such as industrial organization, antitrust and regulation, arts and sports economics, and issues of tax policy and local economic development which has enabled Seaman to bring real world economic issues inside the classroom. Additionally, Seaman’s rapport with students from a variety of ideologies and nationalities allows him to share this wealth of experience in an accessible, engaging, and enduring way.
