Congratulations to Matthew McManus for being winning the 2024 Metrick Family Creativity and Collaboration in Curriculum Award!

The Undergraduate Affairs Committee, composed of Rick Hall, Ann Heffernan, Brian Min, Shea Streeter, and Mariah Zeisberg, is pleased to announce that Matthew McManus, Lecturer in Law, Courts, and Politics, is the winner of this year’s Metrick Family Creativity and Collaboration in Curriculum Award.

The award goes to a faculty member who has developed or redeveloped an undergraduate course that promotes respectful dialogue, collaboration, and discussion of different perspectives on issues.

In his class “Research Methods in Law and Society,” Prof. McManus supports students in designing comprehensive research proposals. The class introduces students to various substantive questions on the law, ways of conceptualizing the law, and methodologies for studying legal practices. McManus advanced the goal of promoting respectful dialogue across differences in how he structured student collaboration. One example is how he engaged students in group work on exploring the legal consciousness of respondents from marginalized communities, asking students to develop interview questions that are both intellectually focused and ethically appropriate. McManus and his students have testified to how this design allowed students to build empathy and analytic rigor. Students in the class took an incredibly intense interest in policing and family law; approaching these themes from the research design perspective generated energy, enthusiasm, and a sense of collective engagement in the class.

Past winners include Justine Davis (2023), Mary Gallagher (2022), Charles Shipan (2021), Lisa Disch (2020), and Mariah Zeisberg (2019).