Linda Orr: High Expections for Students
French teacher says she encourages students to take risks
Monday, April 24, 2006
Every April, the GraduateSchool honors three faculty members with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring. This year's winners are Lisa Campbell, James Bettman and Linda Orr. The award is intended to recognize the importance of mentoring at Duke and to promote discussion of what constitutes good mentoring. For more, click here .
Linda Orr of Romance Studies
Durham, N.C. -- Two words that her graduate students dread hearing, Linda Orr said, are “revise” and “rewrite.”
“Important words – I’ve heard them myself many times from my writing group,” Orr said.
“Mentoring is not just a stimulating, intellectual exchange. There are times when you do need to be tough.”
That philosophy has earned Orr the praise of many graduate students and earned her a 2006 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring. A French professor and Duke alumna, Orr has been teaching in Duke’s Department of Romance Studies since 1980.
Her students cite her ability to critique and encourage at the same time. Orr credits two of her Duke teachers – one of whom will be at the awards dinner – as examples she followed in mentoring her students. Forty years after graduating, she still keeps in touch with Tom McCollough, from whom she learned the Socratic method of teaching, and Anne Scott, “who made me into a thinking person,” Orr said.
“Knowledge is not an object you just hand over,” Orr said. “It’s something you make emerge. You do everything to coax and evoke it.”
Orr encourages her students to take risks, and they have done some very creative and original work, she said with pride. Part of her role as mentor is to set just enough boundaries to keep them on track while allowing them to achieve their greatest potential.
“The students are like all-terrain vehicles, careering off the road,” Orr said. “I see my role as checking the road conditions and potholes. I’m a kind of guidance system.”
One of the more satisfying aspects of mentoring, she said, is to watch her students advise each other and go out into the world and mentor others. After graduation, one of her students took an unexpected career turn and founded a nonprofit organization mentoring middle-school girls to set their sights on college. She still calls Orr periodically to strategize.
“When you watch [your students] develop, you are never sure where you and they are going,” Orr said.
Orr is on leave this semester, easing her way into retirement. Still, she is on five ongoing dissertation committees and is mentoring three more students through their dissertation defense. And even after her name is removed from Duke’s payroll, Orr will continue to work with her students until they graduate.
“This is a long and sustained relationship in which young people are evolving all the time,” she said. “I’m in touch with these students after they graduate. I’m writing letters for them for promotions and grants. They’re recommending new scholarship to me. It’s kind of a lifetime thing.”
