‘Junior’ Faculty Award Winner Takes Cues From her Students in the Classroom

DUNWOODY, Ga—Rosamond Rodman has been teaching for years. But when the occasion arises, she is happy to step out of the way for her students to teach her something new.

Rodman, who is the recipient of the Junior Faculty Award for Excellence, is ‘junior’ only in her time at the college—she came to teach at Perimeter College’s Dunwoody Campus in 2019. The assistant professor of Humanities has taught across the United States for almost two decades.

“I’m at this wonderful place in my career allowing the students to teach me,” Rodman said. “I now know instinctively to look for openings in class to step out of the way and leave space in my overall plan for what we need to cover that day to take advantage of the magic moment when the students take charge.”

As a religious studies professor on the Dunwoody Campus, Rodman loves inquiry from her students when the conversation turns thought-provoking.  “A good student question is worth its weight in gold in the classroom,” she said. "Students often teach me what I've skipped, assumed, left out by asking questions, so I value these moments and leave a lot of room for their queries within my overall classroom."

That ‘classroom’ is often off campus as well, as she has taken students to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu Temple in Lilburn, the Al Farooq Mosque in Atlanta, the Carlos Museum at Emory University and The Temple in Atlanta to help her students learn about different faith traditions.

An advocate of public transportation, Rodman takes MARTA to her classes in Dunwoody and invites students to share the experience when they travel to the different religious sites.

She knows that some of her students are uncertain about going to religious sites that are unfamiliar to them. She hopes that the travel inspires them to think differently. “If you’re learning about places through actually being in and around those places and the people who are practicing that faith, I think that’s an effective way of learning,” she said.

After years of teaching the Humanities at both small liberal arts colleges and large ones in Minnesota and California, Rodman moved to Decatur with her husband to help care for an ailing mother-in-law. “I was lucky to find a place at Perimeter—it’s a wonderful place to be,” she said.  Working at the two-year college of a large public university means she gets the best of both worlds, she said. “I find the diversity of ages and ethnicity at Perimeter to be terrific,” she said.  “I’ve found that I have also had an enormous opportunity to improve as a teacher. The students who come to Perimeter really challenge you to be sure you know what you are doing—they make you want to communicate better.”

Rodman loves teaching in the Humanities.

“I think the so-called crisis of the Humanities is often overstated,” she said.  “I do worry about flattening an education into a quest for a job, though I acknowledge that career goals are important, that real-world pressures are...real. But humanities courses are important because they encourage exploration of also real and perennial human questions; questions of art, intellect, purpose, place; self and /others. Humanities provides students with encouragement, company, and witness in the process of learning to ask about what it means to be a human being--learning that takes a lifetime.”

Story by Rebecca Rakoczy

Photo by Bill Roa