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5/7/2009

Individual attention a priority for Economics' Brown, winner of Rice's top teaching award

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

James Brown believes that the better he knows his students as individuals, the better he will be able to teach them. "What I try to do is come as close as I can to teaching each student as if it were a tutorial," he said.

	JAMES BROWN

For Brown, professor of economics, that becomes quite a challenge when he teaches large classes like ECON 370 (microeconomic theory), which had 79 students this spring. But winning the 2009 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching -- Rice's highest teaching award -- attests to his ability to reach out to all students in a meaningful way.

"Teaching is about more than just presenting ideas clearly -- thank goodness," Brown said. "It's about making sure that those ideas are understood clearly. For me, this requires knowing each student as well as I possibly can. Otherwise, I don't think I'd be able to find, or even know that I should try to find, that third way of explaining something that might be the key to a particular student's understanding of a difficult concept. This means spending a lot of time outside of class with students, but as anyone who knows Rice students well will tell you, that's not work -- it's fun."

Dean of Social Sciences Lyn Ragsdale said, "The School of Social Sciences is again thrilled to have a Brown Teaching Award winner. Professor Brown makes learning about challenging, complicated topics rewarding, and students thrive in his classroom."

Brown has an expansive view of the material he teaches. Labor economics, he explained, is about much more than the AFL-CIO. When he lectures in ECON 415 (labor economics), he touches on issues from fertility and divorce to criminal behavior and discrimination. "If choice is involved, economics can be applied to understand those choices," he said. "It's ultimately about the choices people make in all aspects of their lives."

The 2009 Brown Teaching Award is based on voting by alumni who received four-year bachelor's degrees in 2003 and 2006. Brown noted that his students have commented to him about his enthusiasm for the material he teaches. "I do love what I teach, but I think students largely see their own reflection in me," he said. "I think I'm very fortunate to be in a position where I can introduce so many great students -- great people, actually -- to such useful and interesting material. Helping students develop their intellectual independence is one of the most rewarding things I can imagine. Knowing the students as I do, I feel lucky to be even a small part of their lives. Recognition by such students holds a very special meaning for me."

While acknowledging that teaching a large class is a challenge, Brown said he still prefers reaching a large number of students to a small number. Teaching, he said, is about the student and the subject. "If you get out of the way and let the subject speak for itself," he said, "good things will happen" -- especially with the caliber of students he encounters at Rice.

Brown received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2004, 2006 and 2007. "At the end of every semester, I wonder how I could ever find a group of students to match those I've just taught," he said, "but every semester, I encounter yet another group of students who are willing to work hard, who love to learn and who are excited by discovery. That excitement invariably makes my time spent with students a high point of my day."