Hebl, winner of Rice’s top teaching award, cites basic skills learned in classroom

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

When Mikki Hebl looks back on the many good teachers she’s had, she feels a particular affinity for Elizabeth Dalton, who taught her in the first grade. “She had a genuine sparkle in her eye,” Hebl recalled. “She had a love for every student. She taught perfect penmanship. She loved the craft of teaching. She was always available for a hug and support. She believed in her students and had high expectations.”

	MIKKI HEBL

Hebl, the winner of the 2010 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Rice’s highest teaching award, said Dalton’s “really basic skills are not so different from the ones that I try to emulate in my own classroom.”

Michelle Hebl — who is universally known as Mikki — is an associate professor of psychology who received her bachelor’s degree from Smith College, a master’s degree from Texas A&M and a doctorate from Dartmouth. She came to Rice in 1998.

Hebl has taught courses in industrial and organizational psychology, psychology of gender, research methods, diversity and discrimination, and professional issues. Asked to single out her favorite psychology course to teach, she said, “That’s like asking me ‘Which is your favorite child?’ I love them all.”

She said she likes them for different reasons. “I like teaching social psychology because it was my first passion. I still recall my own social psychology course in college — the only textbook I ever read front to back cover — and I still use the same book, just a much, much later edition! I like teaching psychology of gender because year after year, I get to witness and teach about the more equitable changes and progress our society is making with respect to gender. I like teaching research methods because it is a testing ground for research ideas, and the students independently run projects that sometimes actually get published or turn into honors theses. I don’t get to teach industrial/organizational psychology much anymore, but I also like teaching that because I personally learn the most new information when I’m teaching that class.”

“Professor Hebl is truly one of the most outstanding teachers at Rice,” said Lyn Ragsdale, dean of social sciences. “She challenges her students and provides them with extraordinary experiences in the classroom and the laboratory. She has won 13 major teaching awards — which may be the record.”

Hebl’s research focuses on understanding ”mixed” interactions, or interactions between stigmatized and nonstigmatized individuals. She’s interested in the complex forces that motivate people to stigmatize others while simultaneously pressuring them to appear politically correct or socially desirable by avoiding discriminatory behavior.

She and her graduate students have conducted field research into the more subtle discrimination faced by obese customers trying to get customer service, gay and lesbian applicants applying for jobs, pregnant women trying to complete job applications and obese patients receiving medical care. The larger goal of her research is to understand the expression of current forms of discrimination to remediate it, Hebl said.

Hebl is no stranger to teaching awards. She is a previous winner of the Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2003), as well as three Brown superior teaching awards (2002, 2004 and 2005), among others. “To me, a good teacher is someone who cares deeply about both the subject matter and students,” she said. “I recognize a good teacher when I see someone who is so passionate about their topic that a love and appreciation for it is contagious. Good teachers make learning easy, exciting and relevant.”

Perhaps because she holds herself to such high standards, Hebl insists she rarely feels her lectures go as well as she would like. “I often think things like ‘I should have clarified that better,’ ‘I should have added in some things about X,’ ‘Maybe I should have explained more’ and/or ‘I wonder if they got it,'” she said.

Clearly, Hebl’s students do get it. And her students’ acclamation — the Brown awards are the result of voting by alumni who graduated two and five years ago — is reciprocated by Hebl. “Simply track where they go post-Rice,” she said. “They don’t get rejected from doing what they want to do because their caliber is so high. They are leaders in politics, economics, medicine and academics. They range from big-time investment bankers to caring social workers.

“Last year, I went across the street for a doctor’s appointment, and in walks a specialist who used to sit in my class. Former students are now wiz professors at George Mason University, UCLA and Amherst College. They are nonstop amazing, and I love their mainstream nerdiness, which I also try to emulate.”