Meet Ben—Russian professor, University Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ).
“Teaching a language means opening up our students’ hearts by helping students learn about the perspectives of people from other cultures."
The Start of a Teaching Journey
In the first month of my study of Russian, my instructor, the late and much-loved Emilia Pavlovna Hramova asked me to come into her office where she told me: “You can go as far in your study of Russian as you want.” At that moment, I began to think about changing my major—and I changed it. And then I began to think about earning my doctoral degree to become a professor of Russian. And I did that, too.
This tiny moment of encouragement from my teacher opened up for me a world of opportunity that I had never imagined. I try to be that kind of educator for the undergraduate and graduate students I work with as well as that kind of mentor for educators at earlier stages of their careers.
Career Highlight
When I was teaching advanced Russian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I had a course in which students watched films in Russian and then worked in pairs to retell the narrative of the film from different characters’ points of view, recording themselves and reflecting on their discourse. It turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful learning experience for my students who not only improved their Russian language skills, but observed—in their journal entries shared with me—that they were using more connecting words and phrases in their English language speech as well.
This experience helped me see clearly what so many of us say about world language learning: Studying a second or third language helps us improve our proficiency even in our native language!
