Grace S. Kim (left), clinical associate professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Wheelock College of Education & Human Development,is the winner of the 2023 Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award, which recognizes scholars who excel as teachers inside and outside the classroom and who contribute to the art and science of teaching and learning. Renato Mancuso (right), an associate professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences, has won the 2023 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. Both were honored at an awards ceremony April 25.

Accolades

BU Teaching Awards Honor Two Outstanding Educators

Wheelock’s Grace S. Kim named Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year; CAS’ Renato Mancuso wins Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology

In a key assignment for her Asian American Psychology course, Grace S. Kim instructs students to interview people who identify as Asian or Asian American about their lived experiences. They could be family members, friends, or others close to them.

It’s a way for students to connect classroom lessons to their own lives and the experiences of others—a key part of her teaching philosophy, says Kim, a clinical associate professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. For example, students in the course learn about research that explores how immigrants may want to protect their children from the challenges of their migration history and their current stresses, Kim says. Along with reviewing such research, students conduct their interviews.

“The thing that happens with this particular assignment is that a lot of students talk to their family members about some of the things they always wanted to ask, but never really had the chance,” Kim says. As a result, she adds, the assignment sometimes has a healing benefit for students and their families: “In general, I think this assignment has really brought people together.”

It’s that kind of bringing people together—including her students, who are future mental health counselors—that has earned Kim the 2023 Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award. The award recognizes scholars who excel as teachers inside and outside the classroom and who contribute to the art and science of teaching and learning.

The award citation recognizes Kim for helping her students create meaningful connections by “making psychology, itself, more relevant for a dynamic, racially diverse society” and adds that “students routinely leave Dr. Kim’s classes with greater empathy and appreciation for the struggles of those they will be serving, using words like ‘amazing’ and ‘inspirational’ to describe their experience.” The award comes with a $5,000 stipend. 

The simultaneously awarded Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology also recognizes an inventive faculty member. Renato Mancuso, an assistant professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences, received the award for designing a system that enables students to submit their coding assignments via a web-based interface and then view how their submission performs and compares to their classmates’ work. The award comes with a $10,000 stipend.

Both awards were presented at a ceremony April 25 at the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering.

Called CodeBuddy, Mancuso’s program “has been a home run with students, who appreciate the camaraderie it helps create in a challenging field,” the citation for his award notes. Students say Mancuso’s invention has recast the Fundamentals of Computing Systems course, known as a difficult requirement for computer science majors. “He made the hardest required course for majors the most enjoyable course,” said one student quoted in the citation.

Mancuso, who earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joined the BU faculty as an assistant professor of computer science in September 2017. His research focuses on real-time and embedded systems, including technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. He started developing CodeBuddy in the fall of 2018 as a way to give more attention to a growing number of students taking the course. He has been working with his students to test the system and improve it, for example, by enabling them to submit their code via a website.

After students enter their coding assignments, a shared scoreboard lists their results using anonymized labels instead of student names. The scores indicate if the submission worked as designed and, if not, where exactly misses occurred.

This is where the authentic learning occurs, Mancuso says. Students can experience the kinds of obstacles that occur in programming, they can see where they succeed or fall short—and they can see that everyone encounters such hurdles.

“It’s about understanding that certain obstacles are part of the process, and not to be discouraged by the fact that they haven’t gotten there yet,” Mancuso says. “Sometimes I do that by making them understand there are objective obstacles along the way and they can relate to their peers that are going through the same process. And, by doing that, they can reinforce the idea that, oh, I need to reach out and to ask questions. These are questions that everybody has, and it’s natural to have. It’s demystifying the concept of making mistakes, by saying that mistakes are part of the process.”

Mancuso says the shared experience breeds enthusiasm, with some students requesting to continue their study of systems with him. Groups of students that met in the course continue their study groups in other classes. He has hired several as research assistants, along with taking on direct study students. “There are people who hate it at the beginning and end up just being addicted to systems by the end of the class. They just absolutely love it,” he says.

Witnessing the enthusiasm of his students to learn about material that he cares about gives him purpose as a teacher, Mancuso says. It’s what excited him as a graduate student leading classes and working as a teaching assistant and what continues to inform his work at BU. It’s a feeling validated by the Gitner Family Award.

Mancuso describes connecting with students, sensing their understanding of important concepts, as a kind of superpower that teachers employ and a sustaining feeling that he hopes he’s passing on to his own graduate students.

“They sometimes see teaching as a burden because they’re trying to do research, you’re evaluated on research. And I like to think that their [teaching] work can also be [described] to say, this is actually recognizable as valuable,” he says.

Kim’s approach to both teaching and scholarship derives from her own experience. Born in South Korea, she emigrated to the United States when she was 14. It wasn’t until she was in graduate school that she realized something was missing in her course materials.

“My lived experiences, and those for people like me, were not really included in the curriculum that I was exposed to,” she says. “Then I realized, it doesn’t have to be that way…. We can really intentionally think about ways to teach that will speak to a really diverse student body, with the aim of creating a more just and equitable world.”

Kim’s thinking about how best to teach a diverse range of students extends to her scholarship. She recently coauthored two books. Unraveling Assumptions: A Primer for Understanding Oppression and Privilege (Routledge, 2022), “is a primer for students, faculty, and community leaders to explore the concepts of challenging diversity-related topics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, and disability,” according to her teaching statement. A companion book, Teaching Diversity Relationally: Engaging Emotions and Embracing Possibilities (Routledge, 2022), is a guide for faculty teaching about race and culture that focuses on students’ emotions and interpersonal relationships that are part of learning about diversity and social justice topics.

Kim joined the Wheelock faculty in 2007 as an assistant professor and became a clinical associate professor after the University’s merger with Wheelock College in 2018. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

As someone who has written and presented about teaching diversity and understanding oppression and privilege, Kim says that just because some communities in the United States resist discussing or encountering these topics, it doesn’t mean they will disappear.

“It boils down for me to thinking about the purpose of education, and why do I teach, and why do people need education? For me, it’s really about imagining a more equitable world, and also about how education can fit into that,” she says. “I understand the fear. But as a psychologist, I think not talking about it, not thinking about it, not engaging about it is not going to make anything go away. And, instead actually, that even increases our anxiety…. So, I think a lot of what I’m doing is really shedding light on what’s already happening and creating a really relational and empathic space to engage with really challenging things.”