Female visiting professors narrow gender gap
By Staff Writer

Corinna Hasbach, visiting associate professor of education, has been around the world.

At the age of four, she and her mother left Germany and moved to Canada. She grew up there and attended the University of Toronto, where she received her bachelor's degree in humanities and interdisciplinary studies in 1979.

She then went to the Philippines and taught at a high school. She started her master's degree there, but finished it at Michigan State University, where she also earned her doctorate degree. From there she came to Albion.

Here she teaches Education 225 (Foundations of Education), co-teaches Education 331 (Secondary Methods) and is a field supervisor for secondary students.

"I'm drawn to an institution that values teaching greatly," Hasbach said. Some institutions value publication above education, but that is not the case at Albion, she said. Hasbach sees this as very important because "teaching shapes the future."

Hasbach said she loves teaching and wants to share with her students the keys to being a good educator: critical thinking, loving to teach and open-mindedness.

She also said she would like to leave education students with a passion for learning and teaching. "I want education students to be able to be lifelong learners, competent, caring, and compassionate teachers who struggle to make the world a better place," Hasbach said.

"I hope to publish articles and books that add something significant to the field of education and that promote social justice and equity inside and outside of the classroom." She also wants to leave students with similar expectations.

Jennifer Taylor, Rochester Hills sophomore and a student in the Education 225 class, said Hasbach is wonderful. "Hasbach is very interested in our goals and the kind of teachers we will be."

Taylor said Hasbach leaves the impression that she cares about her students as people and the educators they will become.

"She acts not just as the instructor, but also as a member of the class, sharing and learning."

Taylor said she hopes to emulate Hasbach's desire to involve the whole class in the discussion and complete the learning process.

"[She] helps us to know others with the same dream of being a teacher, who can share and understand our experience," Taylor added.

For the past five years, Beth Henschen, visiting assistant professor of political science, has helped prepare graduate students to become professors at liberal arts colleges like Albion.

Being at Albion is her first job teaching on a small campus, and she is grateful for the opportunity to experience what she has prepared so many graduate students for. "It's a wonderful perspective!" she said.

After being appointed the director of the teaching fellows program at Loyola University of Chicago in 1990, Henschen began to work with graduate students in all areas of study.

The program pairs participants (fellows) with faculty mentors for one year. They meet for weekly seminars and each instruct four undergraduate courses.

Most fellows who graduate usually teach at liberal arts colleges, so Loyola planned the program's preparations around that expectation.

"It was designed to enhance the preparation of future faculty," Henschen added, "by focusing not only on the development of research expertise, but also on the teaching enterprise as well."

Her husband recently became the head of the political science department at Eastern Michigan University. She is now on a leave of absence from Loyola, so she could live closer to Ann Arbor.

Myron Levine, professor and chair of political science, contacted her over the summer about teaching.

"We were really lucky to find someone with such breadth of experience and publication," he said.

Albion's small size and different environment interests Henschen. She has been an assistant professor at Purdue University and an associate professor at Loyola... schools with 60,000 and 15,000 students, respectively.

She is teaching Political Science 289 (Judicial Politics) and Political Science 101 (Politics of American Democracy) this semester.

More importantly, she can now experience for herself what she has taught. Based on her experiences so far, she says the program was "on target."

The small teacher-to-student ratio at Albion put the classes on a "completely different level," she said.

Also, the political science department here is relatively small. This means that fewer faculty have more classes and duties to cover. In spite of this, the small departments lend themselves to a lot of departmental integration and cooperation, which she says is very different from what she is used to.

The difference is good, however, and Henschen said that she is having a lot of fun here.