Experiential learning is the guiding principle of professors Laura Reynolds and Anthony Dell’Aera, the 2024 recipients of the George I. Alden Excellence in Teaching Award. The award is the highest recognition for pedagogy and instruction at Worcester State University.
The Center for Teaching and Learning: Faculty Development Center (CTL) created the award to publicly acknowledge professors who have gone above and beyond in changing students’ lives by inspiring curiosity, fostering understanding, and challenging students to achieve their best. Each year, Worcester State recognizes two current, full-time, tenured or tenure-track professors who have consistently demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to teaching that is academically challenging and motivating. Reynolds, assistant professor of earth, environment, and physics, and Dell’Aera, associate professor of history and political science, gave remarks at an event held in their honor Feb. 7 in the Sheehan multipurpose room.
“I get to work alongside the most remarkable and dedicated faculty who make the university a vibrant and inspiring place to learn and to grow and to work,” Emily Soltano, professor of psychology and director of the CTL, said at the start of the event. “While this is a celebration of two extraordinary educators at Worcester State, it’s also a moment to honor all of our faculty. Every professor who steps into a classroom, mentors a student, or sparks a love of learning is part of what makes Worcester State so special.”
“Teaching excellence has been a cornerstone for the university,” said President Barry M. Maloney, pointing out the university’s groundbreaking teaching practicums that started in the 1800s, as well as the CTL and peer learning, among other more recent initiatives. “Prioritizing excellence in teaching is something that has endured. It’s what we are known for,” he said.
Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Russ Pottle introduced the honorees. He highlighted Reynolds’s commitment to active learning, highlighting how Reynolds uses field trips and lab work to connect foundational concepts with the real world. Reynolds enables students to practice real science and encourages them to apply what they learn in the lab to the broader world. “Reynolds teaches with humility,” he said, “noting that active learning in lab and field activities often doesn’t go as planned.” She has been the recipient of a number of grants.
Dell’Aera, Pottle said, describes himself as a “pracademic” and challenges his students to identify as stakeholders in their communities. He is the inaugural faculty fellow for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. He also serves on Worcester’s Zoning Board of Appeals and as a political analyst for various outlets, and he encourages his students to apply their political science learning no matter their field of study or occupational aspirations. He is a prior recipient of the university’s Binienda Center Faculty Civic Engagement Award.
Reynolds’s talk focused on the value and importance of learning through failure. She shared anecdotes of doing a formula wrong in class and getting herself and her lab group along with their gear stranded on a mudflat because she read the tide table wrong. Like many academics, she said, she was never formally trained to teach. She has become the teacher she is now by learning from colleagues and mentors, her students, and the mistakes she has made along the way. “In many ways, I treat teaching like scientific research: I experiment, make observations, interpret those observations, change course, and repeat.”
That’s one of the reasons active learning is such a big part of her courses. Because environmental science is an interdisciplinary field, Reynolds aims to teach her students skills that are transferable across a range of career paths. It’s essential for students to learn science by doing science, she says, and to practice adaptability and problem solving when things don’t go right—for instance, when equipment malfunctions or the weather is uncomfortable. Her students do field work on Worcester ponds, taking soil samples and electrofishing, and they conduct independent study projects that allow them to study something they’re excited about and to communicate their findings to others.
One of those projects involved working with a student to measure microplastics in Worcester’s water. “The project didn’t work in any traditional way,” she said. There were too many microplastics in the air, and that contaminated their water samples. “But he and I both learned more about the process of science.”
“We learn by doing,” she said, “and we learn by doing things wrong.”
In a talk laced with humor, Dell’Aera described his origin story as a political scientist, starting in 1984 when he was a third grader. Not understanding how voting worked, he offered to cast votes for his classmates and inadvertently built “an elementary school political machine.” He was further perplexed, he said, when he later watched the electoral map fill up with almost entirely one color even though both candidates got millions of votes. “To my elementary school self, it didn’t seem fair,” he said. “And it still doesn’t.”
In graduate school, he ran for school board but lost the party nomination because he was new and other candidates had been “waiting for their turn.” Shortly after that, the mayor appointed him to a seat on the city’s planning board. At the next city-wide caucus, he ran for a seat on the party’s committee and won. The caucuses were so sparsely attended, he said, that if you could fill half of an elementary school classroom with your supporters you could win. “I wasn’t interested in pursuing office,” he said. “I just wanted to have a voice and to represent younger people in the party leadership.”
Political science, he said, “is not just talking politics; it’s a social science where we do many things.” But before his experiences in local government, he’d never learned by doing, he said. It changed his perspective on how he wanted to do political science and how he wanted to teach his students to do political science. He tells his students now that there’s no limit to the issues that the discipline is capable of touching, from the arts to computer science, and he trains them to see political science as something practical, personal, and experiential. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said. “It matters that you do.”
Image: Professors Reynolds and Dell’Aera
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