By Natalie Edwards
Special to the Daily Press

SMC Christine Schultz, chair of the philosophy and social science department at Santa Monica College, had a particularly good day teaching class last week. Extemporizing on the scientific method, emphasizing the importance of the process of solving questions over the value of answers, Schultz got her students to howl with laughter.

The blond haired and cerulean eyed political science professor related to the students in the introductory state government class through their variety of majors. What mattered, she told them with the spontaneous vitality that continuously animates her delivery, was not what organism was in the petri dish or the identification of the hero in the novel — she, a history buff, didn’t care — but how they arrived at the solution. For the moment to be funny, of course, you would have had to witness the professor’s irreverence among the 45 otherwise sleepy-eyed students enrolled in the 8 a.m. class.

"I’ve never done that before and yet that was exactly the right thing to do. I’m always seeing that there are new ways to teach something,” Schultz said.

It is a testament not just to Schultz’s charisma but her willingness to learn and adapt her teaching style that she was among four winners of the 2008 Hayward Award for Excellence in Education, considered the highest honor for California community college faculty. The last time an SMC faculty member won the award, given out by the state’s Academic Senate, was in 1989.

Schultz is appreciative of the recognition, even if she has already long been satisfied just with the extent of student feedback she has received over two decades of teaching.

“I’ve always said for 24 years that I would do what I do for free. There are a couple days when I want to be paid but I really do love teaching. I’ve always said that you don’t need to be recognized. The students do so much of it. I get notes all the time and phone calls, students letting me know where they are,” Schultz said.

The professor has not had to rely solely on the feedback of students. Juggling multiple commitments, unabashedly admitting that even though administrators would disagree, it is the professors that run the school, Schultz has been recognized for her dedication in the past. While teaching at UCLA, a post she held, for years concurrently, from 1979 to 1997, Schultz was twice named Professor of the Year; and at SMC, she was twice awarded the Alpha Gamma Sigma Outstanding Professor of the Year.

Schultz did admit, “When you are recognized, all of a sudden, you realize it does validate what you are doing.”

The professor traces the development of her teaching style and thorough love for leading a classroom to her youth spent at a strict all-girls Catholic school. The nuns there taught her precisely how not to teach and endowed her with a knowledge of the importance of empathy in connecting to and effectively instructing students.

“Going to such a rigid Catholic school, I really did learn the value of kindness. I think I am a kind teacher. I really try to understand my students, particularly in this environment. A lot of teachers get mad when students are sleeping in class, but most of them are working two jobs. This isn’t a cakewalk for them. Most don’t have a lot of parental support, their parents certainly aren’t funding them, and their parents may have never gone to college. I try to be really understanding without being easy,” Schultz said.

Despite the poor example set by the nuns, Schultz knew since she was “the littlest girl” that she wanted to teach. The desire drove her through an undergraduate degree in polical science, specifically American politics, at USC and a doctorate combining psychology, American politics, and comparative politics at UCLA.

Her focus on the nexus of media and election campaigns — what she terms her “real love” — has kept her humbled by giving her an appreciation of the way in which youth keep informed of and drive current events. Contrary to those who dismiss the twenty-something set as apathetic, Schultz is thrilled to research the modern technology most readily utilized by her students. In 2004, that meant researching blogs and the way politicians took advantage of the Internet to galvanize support and raise money; in 2008, that means studying video-based media Web sites like Youtube.com.

“If you’re going to teach American politics, you better stay up on how young people are communicating. It’s really a very different source that nobody has studied yet. I find it very exciting,” Schultz said.

One example she uses is the Democratic campaign of Barack Obama. He, said Schultz, came from nothing, with no Democratic party support behind him. He became one of the two foremost candidates mainly with the use of blogs and Youtube.com.

“That’s how he started, just netroots. That’s amazing, that a young man like Obama can jettison himself onto the international scene, now, just from young people,” Schultz said.

The professor made an exclusive move to SMC in the late ‘90s to further cement her ties with students. She was tired of large lecture halls and wanted to have a more proactive presence on campus. Her bright third floor office overlooking the college, a container of homemade brownies crowns her desk in anticipation of co-workers and students seeking out sweets. Schultz pauses and smiles, musing over a word she has used that was coined only half a decade beforehand.

“‘Netroots’ — so cool, isn’t it?”

news@smdp.com