Professor Robin G. Isserles Wins Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from American Sociological Society

The American Sociological Society (ASA) is the country’s preeminent professional association for sociologists including faculty and individuals working in government agencies and nonprofit or private sector organizations.

The 2024 Annual Meeting of the ASA, held August 9-13 in Montréal, Québec, brought together professionals involved in the scientific study of society and hosted over 5,000 attendees.

The Annual Meeting recognizes nationwide leaders in the discipline, and among the awardees honored at a ceremony on August 11 in Montréal was Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) Professor of Sociology Robin G. Isserles, who won the ASA’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.

“What’s so special about this award is that my mentor, Bob Alford won this very same award back in 1997,” says Professor Isserles. “I was in the audience cheering him on. As far as I know, there have only been three CUNY recipients of this award, and we were the only mentor-mentee pair! And I’m the second community college recipient.”

Dr. Isserles earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2002 and has taught at BMCC for almost 30 years. She is the author of “The Costs of Completion, Student Success in Community College,” released from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2021.

Reviewer Michelle A. Smith writes of “The Costs of Completion” in the April 2023 peer-reviewed journal “Teaching Sociology,” “As teaching faculty engage in the time-consuming tasks of constructing completion plans, rethinking our curriculum to increase retention, developing articulation agreements between two-year with four-year institutions—in combination with pushing students to take more credits and get done quickly—we should slow down to read Isserles’s research, think about her critique of our current model and contemplate a different path.”

The ASA materials say this about “The Costs of Completion”: “As sociology continues to be more inclusive of community colleges, educators should heed the invaluable lessons learned from Isserles and incorporate some of her lived experience into their own lives.”

In a letter recommending Professor Isserles for the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award, Dr. Lisa Hale Rose, Professor and Coordinator of Human Services in the Department of Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice at BMCC writes, “My work that focuses on community college students entering college after incarceration has benefitted immensely from Robin’s insightful comments. In fact, Robin was instrumental in creating our department’s monthly symposia, where colleagues are invited to share their research and pedagogical innovations at various stages of development. So many of us have used that space to further our intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical work.”

As the BMCC Fall 2024 semester kicks off, Professor Isserles returns to the classroom and to her ongoing scholarly work, including a Special Edition on Community Colleges forthcoming in the research journal “Teachers College Record,” co-edited by Professor Isserles and BMCC Professor Michelle Ronda.

The Sociology program at BMCC—along with the Criminal Justice, Economics, Gender and Women’s Studies, Gerontology, History, Human Services, Political Science, Psychology and Urban Studies programs—is housed in the Department of Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice.