Professor Vincent

Hannah Schott
Nov. 30, 2009
Professor Vincent

“College is about grappling with ideas and pushing yourself to figure out where you stand,” said M. Bess Vincent, a social science professor at Anoka-Ramsey Community College’s Coon Rapids campus. People often ask new college students to explain their views on a public issue, Vincent commented. “Students need to know what that issue is so they can grapple with it for themselves,” she said.
According to Vincent, the most important lesson to learn from her classes is the art of argument. Vincent said she hopes students “learn how to put together a successful argument, think about what it is that is at issue, take a position, and articulate the support for that position without spouting what they have heard on the radio or TV or from their parents.” How students discover their feelings on an issue are the lessons they carry with them, Vincent explained.
However, that discovery is a process and it may not be something students realize in her classes, Vincent added. She said that she can not think of any particular moment in her undergraduate years when she felt like she had found herself. The discovery of personal opinion “is a series of learning experiences,” Vincent said. “If I can contribute to students’ learning experiences, then I feel gratified,” she commented.
At Anoka-Ramsey, Vincent teaches general sociology, criminology, juvenile delinquency and a course in relationships, marriage, and the family. Vincent, who attended a small liberal arts school in central Louisiana, took a psychology class and a sociology class in her sophomore year of college. Vincent said: “The psychology class was dealing more with brain stuff. I liked the sociology class better, so I decided I wanted to go with sociology as my major.” Vincent said that undergraduate experiences that she found intriguing are the lessons she tries to convey to her students.
Sociology has provided Vincent with some insights she can use in her everyday life. Vincent stated that she knows she can beat any of her friends at Apples to Apples. She said: “I can usually get a pretty good grasp of people and read people pretty well. Sociology really helps me understand the different roles and statuses that we play.”
Vincent, who has previously taught at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, and Loyola University (New Orleans), said she teaches to a broader audience and a larger spectrum of types of individuals at Anoka-Ramsey than she experienced at any of the other universities. Tulane and Loyola were private schools with wealthy students, Vincent explained, while the types of students she taught at the University of New Orleans were more equivalent to the types of students she teaches at Anoka-Ramsey.
According to Vincent, the many night classes she teaches at Anoka-Ramsey are composed of non-traditional students. “The majority of the students I teach at Anoka-Ramsey are first generation college students with working, middle-class backgrounds,” Vincent said.
Vincent noted the difficulty of seeing some students try their hardest to learn and still not understand the material. Students who do not speak English as a first language have a difficult time, Vincent added. Vincent encourages students who do not understand English well to ask her for help. “That’s my job, to answer your questions,” Vincent pointed out.
“I want students to walk away from my class and feel that I was fair,” Vincent commented. Vincent said her liberal arts education allows her to see issues from many different angles, and said she tries to use that ability when teaching. “To me, class should be an extension of my everyday life, it’s just that I’m having a conversation with 45 people as opposed to sitting on my couch talking to one or two other people,” Vincent said.
Vincent uses in-class exercises throughout the courses she teaches. Vincent and a couple of her colleagues created a budgeting exercise called Calculating the Bottom Line, which Vincent uses in sociology class. Calculating the Bottom Line developed out of a course she and her colleagues took in graduate school, Vincent explained.
Vincent said that none of the in-class exercises she conducts turn out exactly like their descriptions on paper. “They have all been adapted,” Vincent said. “Usually the projects I do involve some kind of hybrid of one or two different exercises that other people have posed,” she added.
One of the exercises Vincent uses in criminology class came from a book for sociology teachers available through the American Sociological Association. “(The book) has a whole bunch of different exercises you can implement in classes,” Vincent said. According to Vincent, a lot of her ideas for in-class exercises are obtained from either that book or from a journal called “Teaching Sociology,” in which Vincent and her colleagues had their budgeting exercise published.
Vincent said that one of the most rewarding moments of teaching is when students incorporate knowledge they learned from her classes into assignments for other classes. “That means I have given them something that they retained,” Vincent said.