A passion for teaching and mentorship

For Lisa Erceg, teaching at the university level is a calling—but it is one she came to in a rather circuitous way.

Erceg spent the early years of her career working in accounting, but felt that teaching was always in her blood. Her grandmother was a lifelong teacher, and Erceg eventually found her way to teaching at the middle and high school levels before joining Loyola’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences, where she’s now entering her 15th year as a full-time faculty member.

For Erceg, this year’s recipient of the Ignatius Loyola Award for Excellence in Teaching, the thing that makes teaching at Loyola so enriching is serving as a mentor. She sees incredible value in training the next generation of scholars, and considers it a way of “paying it forward” from the faculty and staff who mentored her. That includes emeritus scholars and faculty who, she said, are “incredible teachers, outstanding researchers, and incredible human beings,” who emphasized important values like collaboration and appreciation.

Although she has taught a variety of courses in her years at Loyola, Erceg, a senior lecturer in the Department of French, calls French for Professions her favorite. The course encourages the study of French across a variety of fields of study such as medicine and business administration. The value in the course is in its unique ability to draw in students who may not have originally been interested in studying a foreign language but come to realize the importance of having knowledge of a different language in our global society. She sees this as a “very pragmatic” course in which students are able to participate in conversations relevant to their field of learning and are supported in their skills.

Erceg believes the skills learned by studying the humanities are irreplaceable.

“By learning a new language, you are able to hone skills you can’t hone anywhere else in addition to becoming more aware of your home language,” said Erceg.

Students learning a new language are also learning about cultures different from their own, which can be deeply enlightening for students in fields like medicine, pre-health, and business administration. Language helps to round out the student as an individual, which for Erceg is a tremendous blessing and benefit.

Challenging freshmen to ask the right questions 

Every semester, Joseph Vukov, PhD, assistant professor of philosophy, asks himself and his students the same question: How do you create learning opportunities outside of the classroom?

For Vukov (pictured at right), this year’s Excellence in Teaching Freshmen honoree, learning is not limited to the walls of the classroom. He’s focused on incorporating experiential learning, especially considering that he spends less than three hours a week with his students.

Every semester, he strives to create projects that will help students, no matter their major, enrich their critical thinking skills. In one of his courses, Vukov asks his students to spend an entire day without using their smartphone. The exercise is meant to get the students to examine more complex questions, like “how does technology affect our conception of living a good life?” Vukov asks students to question not just whether technology can help us accomplish a certain task, but also, should it?

“Studying the humanities, including philosophy, is important for setting a context for different areas of inquiry,” he said.

Vukov, who recently completed his third year as a full-time faculty member at Loyola, credits the English literature teachers from the small rural high school he attended in Minnesota as sparking his interest in teaching. However, he realized that his personal research interests were more aligned with philosophy than literature after taking undergraduate courses in philosophy.

At Loyola, Vukov believes teaching first-year students is a unique privilege - one that is shared broadly with the campus community but can especially influence students’ education takes down the line.

“What makes great graduates is pushing students toward challenging one another to recognize their values and to continue to live by them in their future endeavors,” he said.

Without the humanities, he sees many of these questions as going unanswered or unchallenged. He hopes to continue exploring his passion for sharing knowledge with Loyola students, teaching courses on “things [he] finds interesting,” and encouraging his students to think independently, creatively, and carefully.