Assistant Director of Foundations in Learning & Teaching
Kate joined the Northwestern University community in May 2017 as the Assistant Director of Foundations in Learning & Teaching. In this role, she supports graduate students and postdoctoral fellows develop their teaching and learning skills through programs such as the Teaching Certificate Program, Graduate Teaching Mentors and Graduate Teaching Fellows, and events such as workshops and the Academic Quarter Kickoff events.
Kate earned her master's in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse from DePaul University in Chicago, where she then served as an adjust instructor in the First Year Writing program and as a coordinator in the University Center for Writing-based Learning. In this role, she collaborated with faculty to develop programming to support learners in developing writing-based skills. In this capacity, she developed her appreciation for peer-to-peer learning and critical reflection, two core values present in much of the work she contributes to the Searle Center.
In addition to teaching composition courses at DePaul University, Kate co-teaches Linguistics 480: American Academic Culture for Non-Native Speakers of English, a course that prepares international graduate students for teaching in the United States. Kate aims to teach in ways that value the lived experiences learners bring to the classroom and help them challenge assumptions they bring with them to create new, deep learning experiences.
Kate’s current scholarly interests include following the growing interest and scholarship around ungrading practices and alternative assessments. She finds joy in connecting scholars (Elbow, Inoue, Shor) and their research familiar to her from her past work in teaching composition and rhetoric to her work now in learning and teaching more broadly. She also continues to deepen her understanding of critical reflection and how it strengthens the work of both instructors and learners. She is currently in the early stages of a collaborative research project on the impact of one-off and short-term workshop series on faculty & graduate student instructors’ professional development and the intended use of those workshops within centers for learning and teaching.
Kate Flom Derrick
627 Dartmouth Place
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 847-491-3106
Email: katherine.flom@northwestern.edu
