2020-2021
Abhishek Kottaram Amrithanath
Abhishek (Abhi) is a fifth year PhD student in the department of Mechanical Engineering. He has been actively involved in various teaching roles at Northwestern such as being a TA for seven quarters and leading workshops at the Graduate Student Teaching Conference. While pursuing the Teaching Certificate Program, he worked on a Searle Teaching-as-a-Research project on self-regulated learning. He was awarded the Fellowship in Leadership for his leadership roles in and outside classrooms such as President of McCormick Graduate Leadership council and Chapter-Secretary of NU-SPIE. Currently, he is involved in a project to create video tutorials to help middle school students from underrepresented communities prepare for a Chicago citywide coding challenge.
Abhishek's Project:
Students in the different departments of the McCormick Engineering School at Northwestern University go through classes in different contexts – lectures with different class sizes, labs, flipped classrooms and online teaching. The best practices for teaching and strategies for assessing learning needs vary in these different settings. It is pertinent that the graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are trained to identify and apply these practices of instruction to provide a better learning environment for the students. In his Graduate Teaching Fellowship project, Abhishek proposes to create targeted training modules based on universal design for learning to help TAs in the McCormick school with designing office hours, lectures and other teaching environments.
Jonathan Schultz
Jon is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Chemistry Department. He uses experimental and theoretical tools to examine the function of quantum mechanics in harvesting solar energy. His ambitions to develop and share pedagogical tools stem from the role his mentors have played in shaping his own career. He has served as a teaching assistant in several general chemistry courses and an advanced physical chemistry lab at Northwestern. As a volunteer for the Science Club Mentor Program, Jon realized a passion for boosting the accessibility of science. He now seeks to use graduate research as an active learning tool at Northwestern.
Jon's Project:
The Northwestern Chemistry Department is an internationally prominent research institution. However, undergraduate students remain widely separated from graduate research. The opportunity to engage with research as a chemistry novice offers a unique connection between coursework and real-world applications. Moreover, framing research results in accessible language can strengthen communication skills needed for any teaching context. Jon’s project aims to expand learning and teaching opportunities by producing videos that establish links between undergraduate course concepts and graduate research projects. By featuring a diverse group of graduate students, these videos will help undergraduates contextualize knowledge and empower them to pursue their own research experiences. To check out the videos, head to NU Chem Videos on YouTube!
Warren Snead
Warren is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Political Science department. His research examines the many ways in which the U.S Supreme Court influences Congressional politics and the development of public policy at the federal level. In the classroom, Warren has served as a Teaching Assistant for Constitutional Law, Dilemmas of American Power, and the American Presidency. Before coming to Northwestern, Warren taught history, civics, and geography at a middle school in Virginia Beach, VA.
Warren's Project:
Throughout the 2020-21 school year, Warren seeks to maintain and expand the Political Science Teaching Committee. The Teaching Committee sponsors department-wide programming, holds pedagogical discussions for its members, and provides an environment in which participants prepare job-market materials related to their teaching practices. This year, Warren hopes to expand upon the Teaching Committee’s existing mentorship program for new TAs by providing more structured opportunities for mentor-mentee check-ins and by developing department programming designed to specifically meet the needs of our new TAs.
Aisha Valiulla
Aisha is a 4th year at the History Department and the 2020-21 Teaching Coordinator for the department's Graduate Teaching Committee. Her research is focused on the literary legacies of Indian Ocean trade and cross-cultural exchange during the late antique era (900--1400). She has been a TA at Northwestern for two years and is particularly interested in thinking about ways to facilitate community within the classroom, to engage students through both active learning strategies and lectures, and methods of self-evaluation by which TAs can gauge the effectiveness of their teaching.
Aisha's Project:
Through the History Graduate Teaching Committee, Aisha hopes to inaugurate a Lecture Observation program within the History Department. This project hopes to act as a facilitator to match graduate students interested in observing different lectures to willing faculty members. Not only does the project expose graduate students to opportunities to evaluate and consider different types of pedagogy within the History discipline, but it also opens avenues of conversation between graduate students and faculty about teaching anxieties, trials and errors, and pedagogy in general.
Eugenia Vasileiadou
Eugenia is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Chemistry Department. Her research focuses on the exploratory synthesis, thin film fabrication and structure-property characterization of halide perovskites for optoelectronic applications. At Northwestern, Eugenia has been a teaching assistant for several sequences of General Chemistry courses, including laboratory and recitation sections. She has completed the Teaching Certificate Program, and served as a workshop leader for the Northwestern Graduate Student Teaching Conference and the Chemistry Department-Orientation TA training. Additionally, she has been involved in outreach instruction of Hellenic culture and language. Eugenia is passionate about implementing learning-centered and inclusive teaching practices in STEM.
Eugenia's Project:
A General Chemistry course consists of multiple components, amongst these are recitation and office hour sections. These sections are centered on enhancing students’ conceptual understanding and honing their problem-solving skills. Even without the current realization of online teaching, these objectives require a skillful synthesis of technical and pedagogical planning. The goal of Eugenia's project is to develop recommendation guidelines for TA recitation meetings and office hours to facilitate effective TA instruction and inclusive practices in these sections, considering an online teaching environment. The development of the project will also include formative teaching methods and collecting feedback from TAs to probe the efficacy. In all, the proposed guidelines for the structuring of TA meetings will help equip TAs to effectuate instructional decisions based on pedagogical reasoning, to respond to students' current learning needs.
Keary Watts
Keary is a fifth-year candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre & Drama program and is a Franke Graduate Fellow at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. His dissertation, “Strategic Re-deployment: the American Blackface Minstrel Tradition from 1965 – 2010” historicizes anti-racist uses of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions by contemporary Black theatre artists. He develops the concept of “strategic re-deployment” to theorize how this artistic choice constitutes a legacy of derogatory representation even as it signifies on this legacy to realize alternative possibilities for understanding resistance politics and advancing social change. He has taught classes on research and scholarly writing, dramatic and performance theory, contemporary American theatre, and race and performance.
All first-year Theatre majors must take "Theatre 140-2: Analysis and Research," a class routinely taught by first-time graduate instructors in the third year of the Theatre & Drama Ph.D. program. These graduate instructors must balance unfamiliar teaching demands with a host of other milestones related to coursework and the dissertation. Keary’s GTF project creates a network of support and skill-sharing for first-time instructors through a series of year-long workshops meant to facilitate each step in the course design, implementation, and revision processes. His ultimate goal is to initiate a lasting support system for graduate instructors and establish common teaching practices that clarify basic scholarly skills for first-year students in the Theatre Department.
