2018-19
Anne Boemler
Anne is a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. She studies how popular poetry transformed Protestant theology into everyday devotional practice during the English Reformation. She has been a TA at Northwestern for a variety of courses, including Intro to Shakespeare and British Literary Traditions, and won the Department of English Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award for her individually-taught course, "What Can Fictions Do?" She is especially interested in working with early-career graduate students to develop comfortable, engaging course climates.
Anne's Project:
Every graduate student in the Department of English teaches extensively in a variety of course contexts - and so every graduate student is in the process of becoming an expert teacher. Anne's project provides a forum for share experience and experiments with collegiality and curiosity. She will hold a monthly discussion series structured around various topics in teaching, from how to build course climate in the first weeks of class to how to write a teaching statement. While Anne will provide strategies drawn from the literature on teaching and learning, these discussions will also be an opportunity for peer troubleshooting and mutual learning.
Christopher Brue
Chris is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Chemistry Department. His research is focused on studying metal-protein interactions in Alzheimer’s disease to facilitate the development of new therapeutics. He has been a TA for General, Organic, Analytical, and Physical chemistry course in both his time at Northwestern and as an undergraduate. He is particularly interested in developing new tools and methods to convey core mathematical concepts in STEM to a wide range of audiences.
Chris's Project:
Undergraduates entering their introductory STEM courses come from a variety of educational backgrounds, especially with regards to mathematical fluency. The highest level of math students take in high school can range from algebra to integral calculus which makes effectively teaching core STEM concepts to the entire class particularly challenging. It is not uncommon that students struggle with core scientific concepts because they do not have experience with the math used to describe them. Therefore, the focus of Chris's project is on developing new tools and methods for graduate student instructors to visualize the math behind core scientific concepts more effectively teaching their entire class, regardless of mathematical background. This includes running workshops TA’s and developing electronic visual aids graduate students can use in their classroom.
Eric James
Eric James is a fourth-year student in Rhetoric and Public Culture. His current research focuses on how control overlaps with resistance in digital networks and how we might embrace network metaphors in their partiality, instability, and unknowability. More broadly, Eric works in technology and cultural studies and is particularly interested in video games, social media, and trolling. Pedagogically, Eric is interested in incorporating more student-led peer, self, and teacher assessments into undergraduate classrooms. He currently teaches public speaking at Northwestern, a class that is heavily inspired by his seven years teaching martial arts.
Eric's Project:
Eric’s project is designed to provide more infrastructure for the public speaking instructors at Northwestern. He is providing quarterly speech labs for undergraduate students to workshop their speeches outside of the public speaking classrooms. These speech labs will include both one-on-one meetings with Eric and peer-review workshops in which students evaluate one another based on class rubrics. Additionally, Eric is helping establish a regular summer training program week for incoming instructors which includes panels with existing instructors, tech demos, and performance workshops.
Sasha Klyachkina
Sasha is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Political Science department who researchers governance, violence and armed conflict, and citizen engagement, with a focus on the North Caucasus. Her teaching is organized around the belief that schools and universities serve as "direct experiences of civic authority relations" (Bruch and Soss 2016) and she tries to build her classroom accordingly, creating space for critical engagement with real-world events, problems, and power relations. She taught high school the Northwestern, and during her time here has completed the Political Science Graduate Student Teaching Certificate and was honored to receive the department’s Minar Prize for Teaching Excellence.
Sasha's Project:
For her GTF project, Sasha is leading the Political Science department's Teaching Committee, established in 2012. In addition to guiding pedagogical discussions for the committee members, the committee organizes professional development events on teaching for the department and coordinates the new TA mentorship program. Specific events are guided by member and department needs and interests.
Shaunna McLeod
Shaunna is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry. Her research focuses on improving the sensitivity of MRI contrast agents for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. At Northwestern, she has served as a TA for general chemistry and advanced laboratory courses and she completed the Searle Teaching Certificate Program in 2018. Her teaching interests center on active learning strategies and laboratory instruction as a means to promote the relevance of material and retention of students in STEM. She also leads the graduate student group WISER (Women in Science and Engineering Research) which provides community and support to advance women in STEM at Northwestern and beyond.
Shaunna's Project:
The original research component in the General Chemistry Laboratory is an essential first step in transitioning students to thinking like researchers and developing their own scientific questions. Exposing students at an early stage to this process is important in building confidence and excitement about the chemical sciences, ideally promoting interest in undergraduate research and retention of students. In its current form, the research project is the development of an original demonstration that illustrates chemical concepts while building communication skills. Feedback from students has been positive, but the quality and assessment of the projects have widely varied. Shaunna's project seeks to restructure this experience in order to elevate overall project quality and standardize assessment across TAs, accomplished through student advising meetings and TA workshops. Additionally, surveys will be implemented to collect evidence on students’ self-reported interest in science, confidence in the laboratory, and communication skills development before and after the original research experience.
Noran Mohamed
As part of an innovative change in the methodology and curriculum of intermediate French courses, the department of French and Italian will be implementing “Flipped French” which inverts the typical learning structure – students do a majority of language learning at home so that classroom time may be used for developing communicative skills.
Kaitlyn Perez
Kaitlyn is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry. As an NDSEG fellow, she studies charge transfer between semiconductor nanocrystals and small molecules. She has been a teaching assistant for general chemistry lecture and laboratory courses at Northwestern University. She participated in the Searle Center’s Mentored Discussion of Teaching in 2017. Kaitlyn is developing tools that empower general chemistry teaching assistants to create effective course materials that support student learning. She is especially interested in best practices for continuously assessing students’ understanding and mastery of course material.
Kaitlyn's Project:
Teaching assistants for general chemistry lecture courses are expected to prepare course materials and review sessions for students with few resources and minimal input from faculty instructors. The goal of Kaitlyn's project is to provide these teaching assistants with resources to help them prepare course materials more effectively. To accomplish this goal, she will develop a comprehensive, searchable, and evolving database of chemistry problems. Additionally, she will implement weekly surveys in general chemistry courses that assess the areas that students are finding most challenging. This two-pronged approach will enable teaching assistants to more efficiently prepare course materials that support student learning.
Dana Westmoreland
Dana is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry working in Emily Weiss’s lab. She studies the chemical processes that occur at the interfaces of semiconductor nanocrystals as a result of their environments. Dana has served as a teaching assistant for the introductory general chemistry lecture course and as a laboratory teaching assistant for organic chemistry. She has participated in Searle Center workshops and completed the online course “An Introduction to Evidence-Based STEM Undergraduate Teaching,” offered through CIRTL. Dana is especially interested in developing pedagogical approaches that draw strong connections between scientific concepts and their real-world applications.
Dana's Project:
As potential future faculty members and teachers, it is critical that graduate teaching assistants have experience grading undergraduate students’ based on their approach and not solely on their ability to reach the “correct” answer. Such partial-credit based questions, however, often take longer to grade than questions in which there is a correct numerical answer. Dana's project focuses on developing questions that assess students’ conceptual understanding of the course material and rubrics for grading that both decrease the time spent on grading and emphasize the importance of assessing students’ thought processes when approaching problems. This project will enable graduate students to become more effective teachers.
