Elizabeth Stevens

Mice chitter in the snake cage. The projector glows blue before displaying a hawk swooping across the sky. Students’ eyes widen for the weekly Fun Film Friday in Biology Instructor Elizabeth Stevens’s class.

“I found that I am more of a generalist, and I really just like to know a lot about biology in all areas.”

Stevens first found her passion for teaching while working on marine biology research. After college, Stevens found that she didn’t enjoy focusing on one specific topic in the way her research approached science. “I found that I am more of a generalist, and I really just like to know a lot about biology in all areas,” Stevens said.

Stevens gave some thought about how to apply her preference to a career and realized that teaching biology was perfect for her. She took an internship at Northfield Mount Hermon School and stuck with teaching ever since. “When I tried teaching at Northfield Mount Hermon, I loved it and never looked back. I knew that I wanted to do it for the rest of my career,” said Stevens.

Following her internship at Northfield Mount Hermon, Stevens has taught at the all girls Windsor School in Boston and a public middle school in California before arriving at Exeter in 2000.

Stevens decided to teach at Exeter because she wanted to be in an environment that valued its faculty and had exceptional students. “Some smaller boarding schools sometimes overwork their faculty, whether they’re coaching sports [or] doing dorm duty. I knew that teaching is the most important thing here,” Stevens said.

This term, Stevens is teaching two general biology classes, Human Population and Resource Consumption, as well as Human Anatomy and Physiology. Stevens chose to teach the Human Anatomy and Physiology elective because of her background with the subject during college. “When I was in graduate school, I took a lot of anatomy and physiology because I thought about going to med school,” Stevens said.

As for the Human Population and Resource Consumption elective, Stevens said that the class was created from her passion for environmental science. In the class, she teaches about topics such as demography, the study of populations, over consumption, agriculture and urban design. “The premise of the class is that populations of people are growing, so what are we going to do in terms of feeding them and housing them in the future?” Stevens said.

Her friend and colleague, Biology Instructor Anne Rankin admires the class for the service project each class tackles during the course of the term. “The service project done each year by students in this class was her idea and is a critical part of the curriculum,” said Rankin. For example, one year, the students in the class approached plastic water bottles on campus, leading Exeter to become a water bottle free campus.

In addition to the service projects, Stevens was the original initiator of the Climate Action Day and still works on the committee. Fellow Biology Instructor Sydney Goddard described Stevens as “the force behind our first Climate Action Day; she gathered the troops and led the charge.”

Stevens believes that the first step to addressing environmental issues like global warming is through reaching out and educating, which was one of the reasons behind creating Climate Action Day. “I really think that every student needs to have more environmental education. People who are interested in environmental science take the environmental classes, but the students that we really need to reach aren’t taking them,” said Stevens.

With the progress that Climate Action Day has already brought to the student population, she intends to make environmental science a larger part of students’ required education. She is currently working with a group of faculty and staff that plans to create an environmental science requirement and steer the campus towards carbon net zero. “Initiatives on campus are important in terms of keeping the campus itself sustainable and moving toward carbon net zero,” Stevens said.

Along with environmental advocacy, Stevens’s other passion is being able to interact with Exeter’s students everyday. “I love the curiosity and how bright and hard-working the students are. It makes my day everyday to be working with the kids,” Stevens said.

Senior James Fortin, who had Stevens for his winter and spring terms of prep biology, and later, Human Anatomy and Physiology, appreciated her dedication to making sure that students understand the topics. “She has a good sense of when students need her to step into our discussion, and her explanations are thorough,” Fortin said.

He also recalled Stevens’s humor on his first day of class when she said that she wished to be a bioluminescent dinoflagellate if she were to be reincarnated as an animal. “She really is a unique teacher, and I am glad I had the chance to meet her,” said Fortin.

Goddard praised Stevens for her creative teaching and promotion of a lively learning environment, such as implementing Fun Film Friday and online interactive quiz game Kahoot. “She[is] super organized and knows her subject; she puts a lot of time into finding material she thinks will grab her students,” Goddard said.

Biology Instructor Richard Aaronian recounted the liveliness of Stevens’ classroom. He said, “I teach in the classroom next to her and there is often laughter coming from her students.”

Prep Noah Lee also noted her enjoyable style of teaching. “She is thorough when it comes to class. She makes sure we play different activities to engage us, and she is passionate,” Lee said.