Assistant Professor of English Rachel Ewing awarded Nielsen Fellowship, participates in year-long continued education program

Making the transition from PhD student to new faculty member can be challenging for “early-career” professors like Assistant Professor of English Rachel Ewing. Like many other early-career professors around the country, however, Ewing is invested in overcoming those challenges and using them to her advantage to become the best professor she can be, which is why she applied to be a Nielsen Fellow.

Participating as a Nielsen Fellow in the 2024−2025 Teaching Workshop for Early-Career Faculty at Small Liberal Arts Colleges is one of the ways Ewing is working toward this goal. The year-long workshop is provided by the Nielsen Center for Liberal Arts at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and strives to bring together young faculty from across the country who teach at small colleges and universities like Lees-McRae.

“We really just get together to learn from each other and to figure out how to best provide the benefits that a small, liberal arts education can give to students,” Ewing said. “One thing it does is ask educators to think really critically about the purpose of a liberal arts education as a whole, the purpose of our courses, the goals of our institutions, how all those things tie together, and how we can change the things within our power to make those things fit together better.”

Over the course of the program, faculty members in Ewing’s cohort participate in three in-person workshops in summer 2024, early 2025, and summer 2025. At these sessions participants collaborate to develop different approaches to teaching, compare teaching methods, engage in interdisciplinary educational activities, and more.

Between sessions, participants implement new approaches and practices and continue to develop their goals and strategies in the classroom by completing further reading, facilitating continued conversation and collaboration between program participants, and developing ideas for a teaching seminar that each participant will deliver later in the program.

“We do a lot of activities to help us understand who we are in the classroom, and how our personal experiences and challenges affect our teaching and our expectations for students,” Ewing said. “It was very helpful for me to see the activities my peers from other fields are doing, and the way they structure their courses, the value systems they use, and how they teach. It helps me understand what students are going through and what they have to navigate throughout the semester. I can maybe adjust what I’m doing to help them get the best experience.”

One of Ewing’s key takeaways from the first in-person session she attended in June is an emphasis on interdisciplinary education. In each of her literature- or writing-focused courses Ewing strives to help students understand the way the skills they are learning in her classroom are transferable to a variety of career paths and fields of study.

Ewing is bringing this focus on interdisciplinary skills into her classroom this fall. Following the first session of the Nielsen Center’s teaching workshop, she said she has revised the syllabi for each of her courses to more clearly illustrate the interdisciplinary connections she strives to help students make throughout the semester.

“Right now, there has kind of been a disappointment, or people losing faith in what higher education can provide to them. I think that it’s really important for us to come together to make sure that we are being innovative and trying new things to help meet student needs. We believe so deeply in what we’re doing, but that doesn’t mean that we need to do it the same way that we’ve done even five or 10 years ago,” she said. “We need to keep up with changing times to make sure that we’re being the best teachers we can be, and I think things like this are just very helpful to get out of the bubble of your institution and meet other people from other places.” 

Ewing will attend the second session of the program at Eckerd College in January 2025. She teaches courses in literature and English.