Lessons in Teaching, Learning

Jeff Grace and Nicholas Regiacorte were both surprised to be receive The Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Prize, an honor especially humbling because they were chosen for the award by their peers -- other members of the Knox faculty.The sole criterion for the prize is outstanding teaching, so it goes without saying that students learn plenty from Grace and Regiacorte. But what has teaching meant to them?

What is your favorite teaching moment?
“Just one?! I have many moments. The best days are those when the class discussion is so intense that nobody wants to leave the room, or we forget about time and just continue the discussion. I love the feeling of leaving the classroom and seeing my students continue to talk about what they’ve just discovered. Other great teaching moments have occurred outside the classroom, in the rehearsal hall, or simply walking to the Gizmo—when a student stops you to talk about an idea or a concept they are piecing together, those are the moments when I realize true learning through genuine inquiry is taking place.”

Jeff Grace
Assistant Professor of Theatre
At Knox since 2009

What have you learned from your students?
“I learn a great deal from my students, on a daily basis. I see new things in a poem or essay. But perhaps the greatest lesson I have taken away from the classroom is that art is renewable. Whether in a discussion of meter in Paradise Lost or in the workshop of a student’s original poem, I find that our collaborative appraisals of charged language often renew my faith in its power. In either case, I find that merely being in the company of ‘fresh idioms’ refreshes my desire and ability to write.”

Nicholas Regiacorte
Associate Professor of English
At Knox since 2002