The 2025 Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level is presented to three distinguished educators: Rebecca Sears, Stephen Kershner, and Sarah McCallum.
Rebecca Sears
Any course taught by Rebecca Sears is abuzz with enthusiasm, engagement, humor, and reflection. The broad range of her teaching comprises the seventeen different courses she has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, many of which she has either substantially overhauled or created from scratch, as well as the remarkable variety of assessments she uses in those classes. One student who had taken several courses from Professor Sears noted, “Every class, whether in Latin composition, Ancient Greek philosophy, or Ancient Music, was carefully structured to cultivate both precision and imagination.”
From the first day of class, when Latin elegy students are asked to identify tropes in their favorite love song as a way to connect their own experience to the course, to a final exam for a film class in which students designed a final exam for the course, Professor Sears’ thoughtful assessments foster engagement with Classics, connections between the ancient world and today, the development of transferable skills, and students’ awareness of and appreciation for those skills. The variety and success of Professor Sears’ classes has brought in a steady stream of Classics majors and minors, and her students often stay in touch with her after they graduate. One alum now embarked on their own teaching career commented, “I still model my teaching on the kind of interpersonal compassion I got to experience and benefit from as her student.”
Professor Sears’ embrace of variety extends beyond the content and design of her courses to the varieties embodied by the students themselves. A testing accommodation for film class exams requiring students to view clips, in which students with accommodations Zoomed into the exam from a quiet testing location where they then had extra time to write their responses, was designed with input from the students themselves. As part of the Washington University Civil Society initiative, she is the recipient of a Cultivating Disagreement Curricular Development Grant for which she has created a new course on the Second Triumvirate that uses role play to invite students to explore topical and timeless issues of power and government through a pivotal time in Roman history. Her students appreciate her handling of disagreement: “she treats differences not as points of division, but as an opportunity to further discuss the topic, making us comfortable to share our ideas.”
Professor Sears models the ongoing reflection and improvement that she asks of her students, who complete exercises like writing reflections in which they must respond in writing to five comments on their final project drafts. Professor Sears is constantly improving on her own teaching, responding in real time to student input and revising her syllabi to incorporate new developments ranging from the recent release of “Gladiator II” to the breakneck speed of AI innovation to the need for different kinds of reading prompts as students’ reading abilities have changed.
The SCS is delighted to honor Rebecca Sears with the 2025 Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Classics at the College and University Level.
Stephen Kershner
It’s no small task to be the lone classicist at a college or university: yet not only has Stephen Kershner of Austin Peay State University persevered in this challenging task, he has also managed to excel as a teacher and mentor to his students. The orientation of his teaching philosophy views education not in terms of resource constraint but in terms of its integrative, imaginative, and collaborative possibilities. He sees risk as essential to learning, encouraging students to practice “getting our wrong in every single day.” And he is committed to cultivating a classroom space that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, holding the view that the “ultimate test of accessibility is whether classical education can serve those most excluded from it.” A tireless innovator of his own pedagogical practices, Kershner “continually attempt[s] new pedagogical methods to try to find fruitful educative recipes.”
His recipes produce stunning results, his teaching philosophy manifest in his teaching and mentorship practices and outcomes at every level. In his classes, Kershner includes multi-modal assignments that get students deeply into texts and material culture, that require students to work collaboratively, and that help students see the spaces they inhabit on campus as comparable to the ancient spaces they are studying. Both students and colleagues particularly note Kershner’s consistent and innovative efforts to design courses that engage students in analyses of social issues across historical and modern settings, to help them connect the contemporary world to the ancient past in meaningful ways. Moreover, students praise him for inspiring a classroom that values their insight and they consistently give him the highest possible scores for cultivating a welcoming classroom environment.
Kershner’s success extends well beyond the classroom in multiple ways. He is wildly successful at helping undergraduate students take their insights beyond their coursework and at ushering them more deeply into the craft of research: since 2014, he has mentored 22 students for 27 research presentations at conferences (including CAMWS); he also mentors undergraduate research through his work as the editor for Philomathes: An Online Journal for Undergraduate Research in Classics. For the past decade he has organized an annual Classics Day that brings excitement about classical antiquity to 150-200 local high school students. And his teaching extends beyond Austin Peay’s student population to the regional prison population as part of the APSU Prison Education Project, through which program he has helped incarcerated students discover their own love for Marcus Aurelius and perform passages from Sophocles. As his colleagues write, “[h]e captivates his students, whether they are an emeritus math professor or an elementary school dropout facing decades of confinement.”
In recognition and gratitude for his tireless, innovative, and wide-reaching work, the Society for Classical Studies honors Dr. Stephen Kershner of Austin Peay State University with the Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College and University Level.
Sarah McCallum
“Dr. McCallum is a pedagogical wizard.” So her students testify, and the magic is evident across Dr. McCallum’s teaching. Whether she is teaching courses in introductory Greek, advanced Latin, or courses in translation, Dr. McCallum’s courses can be counted on to expand students’ skills and give them help in applying them, with a “consistency of excellence” that is recognized by students and colleagues alike.
Innovation and consistency may strike some as strange bedfellows, but both are hallmarks of McCallum’s approach. Students praised the clear rhythm to her courses, allowing for focus on the work itself, rather than keeping track of what was due next. McCallum herself prioritizes this weekly rhythm to help support student’s time management and attention, a practice which neurodivergent students appreciate. Assignments themselves, however, are far from routine, and students regularly testify to joyful engagement with unique twists on traditional assignments, from “Word Journals” and close reading exercises in her course on Homer in Translation to Latin projects working with the apparatus criticus.
McCallum’s ethos as a teacher centers around an “equity-driven” pedagogy adapted to individual student growth, with recognition of the diverse needs and wants of her students. Both revision of errors and reflection are regular parts of McCallum’s assessments, incentivizing and motivating students to learn from mistakes and to adjust their approach to the course material when necessary. McCallum meets 1-on-1 with every student in every course for mid-semester “progress and strategy” meetings, in which she is able to provide personalized (if time-intensive) support, and this personal approach in turn inspires heavy use of office hours from students seeking even more coaching and feedback. While this is no doubt a massive investment of time and energy, the results are striking. Her students testify to dramatic improvements in their language skills. And those who have gone on to success at Ph.D. language exams, specifically spotlight her courses as key to that achievement.
The care and nurture which Dr. McCallum invests into her courses is apparent everywhere. Syllabi, assignments, and course sites alike are beautifully designed and carefully organized. Students love “the amount of passion Professor McCallum had for the texts we examined,and the respect she paid to each student and their individual ideas,” as an anonymous student says in one course evaluation, “I always felt comfortable expressing my thoughts and reactions to what we read thanks to the
environment she created and fostered in the classroom.” It takes a very special kind of teacher to generate students that not only find inspiration in her kindness and support, but also express appreciation that “she maintained high standards and never allowed me to take shortcuts in my work.”
Professor McCallum’s teaching has already been recognized with multiple awards and nominations at the University of Arizona, but the SCS is delighted to join the chorus by presenting Sarah McCallum with the 2025 Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Classics at the College and University Level.
