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05/14/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 05/15/2025 01:55

Wheelock’s Tina Durand Wins 2025 Metcalf Cup and Prize, BU’s Highest Teaching Honor

Wheelock's Tina Durand Wins 2025 Metcalf Cup and Prize, BU's Highest Teaching Honor

Students learn best when schools and teachers understand and honor their diversity, her research shows

"Every week there are all of the things that we have to do as professors, there are so many aspects to our role. But when my classes go well, it's like, all is right with the world," says Tina Durand, a clinical associate professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

Accolades

Wheelock's Tina Durand Wins 2025 Metcalf Cup and Prize, BU's Highest Teaching Honor

Students learn best when schools and teachers understand and honor their diversity, her research shows

May 14, 2025
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Students bring their abilities, hopes, and dreams to class, says Tina Durand, "but there are other dimensions of our identities that are going to influence our experience. How we are perceived, how we feel about ourselves, how we understand ourselves and all of our complexity. And how that frames our opportunities."

The resulting effect on how children learn is at the heart of Durand's work as a clinical associate professor of applied human development at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

Her own teaching has earned Durand this year's Metcalf Cup and Prize, Boston University's highest award for excellence in teaching. She will receive the award during the 152nd All-University Commencement on Sunday.

"It does feel like a validation of and a celebration of what brings me the most joy," Durand says. "Every week there are all of the things that we have to do as professors; there are so many aspects to our role. But when my classes go well, it's like, all is right with the world."

Durand is a developmental psychologist and a former public school kindergarten and elementary school teacher. Her research and teaching address classroom pedagogy and environment, with a focus on the development of ethnic/racial consciousness and advocacy among adolescents.

She's trying to understand "the complexity of what people bring to learning and education, and how context and identity influence those experiences," she says.

Her focus is seen in the titles of her papers, such as "Dimensions of belonging and 'othering' in middle school: Voices of immigrant and island-born Puerto Rican adolescents"; "Overcoming stereotypes to 'master our dreams': The salience of ethnic climate and racial diversity among students of color in middle school"; and "Adolescent youth of color reflect on school ethnic-racial climate, context, and identity in middle school."

Durand's primary data-collection methods have been surveys and student interviews focusing on outcomes such as academic effectiveness and social-emotional well-being in Massachusetts school districts with broad racial and ethnic representation. Earlier, her work focused on family/school engagement, interviewing teachers and parents.

"My work has shown," she says, "that when teachers commit to creating inclusive learning environments-by allowing space for students to share diverse perspectives and experiences, accommodating different learning styles, or advocating for students in the face of inequity-students notice and are more likely to learn and thrive.

"In fact, they consider this as integral to their learning," she says. "In the words of one of my early-adolescent participants, 'I think one of teachers' main goals, even sometimes over teaching, is to make sure we belong. We're at our best so then we can learn our best at the same time.'"

What Durand aims to do is give teachers and other practitioners the skills to be more reflective, more empathic, more aware of diversity. Some of her results were published in December in her book Making the Case for Race in Middle School: Supporting Adolescents and Teachers in Critical Racial Consciousness and Advocacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). (The research studies featured in her book were both funded by small, internal grants at Wheelock, she says.)

She asks her Wheelock students to consider "What does it mean to be advocating for equity? How do we continue to do that right? How do we do that in ways that are affirming? How do we do that in ways that are flexible and creative? How do we do that in ways that are strategic when we need to be?"

That "when we need to be" being "now" for many educators in the current political climate, when diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are being questioned and maligned.

Cycling between feeling angry and feeling demoralized

This semester Durand is teaching a capstone seminar, and she says both she and her students are cycling between feeling angry and feeling demoralized, but also energized by one another.

"I was super nervous this semester, at the beginning of term," she says. "We were starting in January, when the first executive order came out, anti-DEI and all of that. And I thought, oh my goodness. How am I going to do this? And I thought, this is what I have been doing, what I say I believe in. I have to stand behind it."

I thought, oh my goodness. How am I going to do this? And I thought, this is what I have been doing, what I say I believe in. I have to stand behind it.
Tina Durand

She notes that the last chapter of her book is titled "Do What's in Your Power to Do."

Her Metcalf nomination letters mention how closely she works with students, inviting them into research projects in more substantive roles than many expect.

"When you tell a student how well they're doing," says Durand, who is the program director of Wheelock's PhD in Counseling Psychology & Applied Human Development, "you can just see in their face how psychologically affirming that is, how they need that assurance in a time where there are so many things that are happening in the world-they're asking, what's my place in all of this? Am I going to be able to do this? Am I good at it? Am I good at something?"

Durand grew up in central Massachusetts and worked for nearly a decade as a kindergarten and elementary school teacher. Eventually she earned a master's at Lesley University. "That's when I started to think beyond the classroom and a little bit more about research and understanding what it means to engage in evidence-based practice," she says. "How do we dig deeper in terms of understanding learning, understanding children, understanding development. And so that's what brought me to higher education."

After her master's, she earned a doctorate at Boston College and eventually moved to a faculty role at historic Wheelock College before its 2018 merger with BU. "BU students bring so much together, the critical thinking and academic skills, the passion, the commitment to making the world a better place, to changing systems," Durand says.

One thing that was very different for her after the merger was the opportunity to work with doctoral students on research projects.

"We ask questions together. I pose alternative scenarios, and we grapple with those together," she says. "When research is relevant and enacted with equity and care and respect, it can be something really beautiful."

The Metcalf Cup and Prize and the Metcalf Awards were established in 1973 by a gift from the late alumnus and Boston University trustee, Dr. Arthur G. B. Metcalf (Wheelock'35, Hon.'74), to create "a systematic procedure for the review of the quality of teaching at Boston University and the identification and advancement of those members of the faculty who excel as teachers." Michelle Sullivan, a College of Communication professor of the practice of mass communication, advertising, and public relations, is this year's winner of the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Find more information about Commencement here

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