May 28, 2021 Anne E. Bromley Batten's Gabrielle Adams and Lucy Bassett Receive UVA's Prestigious All-University Faculty Teaching Award This past year, teaching professors “kicked it up a notch” in expressing compassion and positivity, not only to keep students engaged, but also to build trust and be there as everyone struggled with the difficult times. Batten's Gabrielle Adams and Lucy Bassett were two of only nine UVA faculty to receive the prestigious All-University Faculty Teaching Award this year. Despite many challenges posed by the pandemic, Adams and Bassett demonstrated outstanding skill, compassion and creativity in keeping students engaged in virtual classes and relating their subject material to daily life. “This year’s teaching award winners reflect the hard work, creativity and dynamism we see from all of our faculty, every day,” Liz Magill, executive vice president and provost, said. “Especially this year, our awardees have created learning environments to engage students and support their best learning in an unusual and challenging environment. They have fostered intellectual excitement and resiliency at a time when our students needed both more than ever.” Here are some of the practices that make these professors stand out and garner their students’ insistence that these award-winning teachers are the best professors they have had at the University of Virginia. All-University Faculty Teaching Awards Gabrielle Adams Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy Gabrielle Adams’ students said they were amazed at how she made 2½ hours on Zoom go by so quickly. She teaches courses such as “Foundations of Behavioral Science,” which prompted one student to write: “It’s a rare and powerful experience when one professor can make you rethink how you interact with the world. Professor Adams was so influential because her teachings made me analyze and change my own behavior, and they formed the bedrock of my academic learning at UVA. Her emphases on heuristics [ways of making decisions more quickly using mental shortcuts; these shortcuts can take the form of stereotypes and biases or introduce other errors] and situationism led me to understand that we’re much less in control of our behavior than we’d like to think, especially when we’re unaware of the social forces which shape our perspectives. Her excellent teaching abilities have impacted my perspective in my other classes, for I understand political, sociological and historical systems as influencing our actions, but which also form what we consider actionable.” Lucy Bassett Associate Professor of Practice and Public Policy, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy Three years ago, Bassett made “a life-changing career shift from policy professional to professor,” she wrote in her reflective teaching statement. She isn’t afraid to teach difficult courses, according to Batten Dean Ian Solomon, who nominated her for this award. She taught an online course this spring, an undergraduate capstone course about the crisis on the U.S./Mexico border. “Students in that class told me that it was a life-changing course,” Solomon wrote, “not only because of the timeliness of the topic, but also because of the passion and perspective she brought to it. It was a difficult class to teach because the situation was evolving in real time, but Lucy was not deterred from the challenge because she knew it would be an invaluable experience for her students.” One of the students who took “Children in Crisis at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” wrote, “I skimmed the description to learn more about the short course. Having spent months living and volunteering along the U.S./Mexico border before and during my time at UVA, I wondered how a university course could begin to convey the mosaic of human suffering, emotional distress, humanitarian need and militarization that is the Southern border. Swallowing these initial hesitations, I arrived to Professor Bassett’s course curious about how we could unpack such gravity in a Monroe Hall classroom. “Exceptionally balancing the aim to inform with instruction that sparked exploration and deep engagement with course themes, Professor Bassett facilitated a course that did incredible justice to the harsh realities of our subject matter. … Refusing to allow students to become overwhelmed by the complexity and sheer frustration that can stem from conversations around humane migration, a central question that always emerged after we grappled with policy consequences was, Where do we go from here?” Read the Full Article in UVA Today Gabrielle Adams Gabrielle Adams is an associate professor of public policy and business administration at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and in the Darden School of Business’s Leadership and Organizational Behavior area. Adams studies the processes and dynamics that give rise to ‘good’ decisions, policies and conditions in organizations. Read full bio Lucy Bassett Lucy Bassett is a professor of practice in public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Bassett is an expert in children, caregivers, and communities in humanitarian and development contexts. Over her 15 year career, Bassett has worked with governments in low- and middle-income countries to expand access to quality education, nutrition and social protection services, particularly for poor and marginalized children and families. Read full bio Related Content Gabrielle Adams The “Equal-Opportunity Jerk” Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias Research In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men. Anger Damns the Innocent Research False accusations permeate social life—from the mundane blaming of other people to more serious accusations of infidelity and workplace wrongdoing. Importantly, false accusations can have grave consequences, including broken relationships, job loss, and reputational damage. In this article, we document an equally pernicious phenomenon—the misuse of anger as a cue to predict whether a suspect has been falsely accused. Finding a Seat at the Interdisciplinary Research Table News UVA Batten hosted the “Annual Behavioral Science Across Grounds Conference” earlier this month, bringing some of the brightest minds of UVA’s research community to Garrett Hall to exchange ideas, interests, and insights. Associate professor Ben Converse gave the keynote. Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem News Batten School professor Gabe Adams spoke with American Talk about the benefits of adopting a subtraction mindset and how to get it done. Lucy Bassett When Research Hits Home: Paper Helps Professor, Student Bond As Survivors News Batten School professor Lucy Bassett and UVA alum Maya Ewart discovered a personal bond that led to a collaborative research project showcasing how depictions of eating disorders in popular culture and media are frequently out of touch with reality. A Global Approach to Improving Outcomes for Teen Mothers and Their Babies News Batten professor Lucy Bassett brought researchers from around the world together to tackle an issue that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the UVA Humanitarian Collaborative, Bassett organized a workshop focused on how more support can be brought to adolescent mothers and young children. Stay Up To Date with the Latest Batten News and Events Subscribe
Gabrielle Adams Gabrielle Adams is an associate professor of public policy and business administration at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and in the Darden School of Business’s Leadership and Organizational Behavior area. Adams studies the processes and dynamics that give rise to ‘good’ decisions, policies and conditions in organizations. Read full bio
Lucy Bassett Lucy Bassett is a professor of practice in public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Bassett is an expert in children, caregivers, and communities in humanitarian and development contexts. Over her 15 year career, Bassett has worked with governments in low- and middle-income countries to expand access to quality education, nutrition and social protection services, particularly for poor and marginalized children and families. Read full bio
The “Equal-Opportunity Jerk” Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias Research In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men.
Anger Damns the Innocent Research False accusations permeate social life—from the mundane blaming of other people to more serious accusations of infidelity and workplace wrongdoing. Importantly, false accusations can have grave consequences, including broken relationships, job loss, and reputational damage. In this article, we document an equally pernicious phenomenon—the misuse of anger as a cue to predict whether a suspect has been falsely accused.
Finding a Seat at the Interdisciplinary Research Table News UVA Batten hosted the “Annual Behavioral Science Across Grounds Conference” earlier this month, bringing some of the brightest minds of UVA’s research community to Garrett Hall to exchange ideas, interests, and insights. Associate professor Ben Converse gave the keynote.
Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem News Batten School professor Gabe Adams spoke with American Talk about the benefits of adopting a subtraction mindset and how to get it done.
When Research Hits Home: Paper Helps Professor, Student Bond As Survivors News Batten School professor Lucy Bassett and UVA alum Maya Ewart discovered a personal bond that led to a collaborative research project showcasing how depictions of eating disorders in popular culture and media are frequently out of touch with reality.
A Global Approach to Improving Outcomes for Teen Mothers and Their Babies News Batten professor Lucy Bassett brought researchers from around the world together to tackle an issue that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the UVA Humanitarian Collaborative, Bassett organized a workshop focused on how more support can be brought to adolescent mothers and young children.