The Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP) provides an opportunity for a diverse cohort of 4-6 University of Washington doctoral students to develop their teaching skills in the context of an integrative interdisciplinary program that spans the arts and sciences. Project fellows work closely with faculty mentors in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program and create teaching portfolios that include evidence of their hands-on experience with theories and practices of interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary pedagogy.
PIP Fellows for 2013-2014:
IAS is happy to announce that five UW doctoral students have been selected from a highly-competitive pool and will be teaching in 2013-2014 as fellows in the eighth year of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP). Alice Pederson, a member of the 2012-13 PIP cohort, will serve as the second year mentor for 2013-14.
Coleen Carrigan (Department of Anthropology), Mentor: Gwen Ottinger.
Coleen Carrigan is a doctoral candidate in Antropology at UW Seattle. Her scholarship interrogates the historical and cultural dimensions of women’s labor. Her ethnographic research investigates the production of computer technology and the social mechanisms by which gender differentiated outcomes in technology fields are reproduced. Her pedagogical approach incorporates peer learning opportunities, diverse teaching methods, and a commitment to examining topics through an intersectional lens to illuminate co-constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality. As a critical race feminist scholar, she works to discover and share strategies that eradicate the barriers excluding women from computer science and transform the powers of technology to advance social justice.
Courses: BISSTS 397 Cultural Domains of Science and Technology; BIS410 Critical Ethnographies.
Annie Dwyer (Department of English), Mentor: Dan Berger.
Annie Dwyerʼs primary scholarly and teaching interests include animal studies, post-humanism, feminist and queer studies, modernism/postmodernism, and post-bellum American literature and culture. She has served as the Expository Writing Programʼs liaison for UW in the High Schools, a program that equips high school teachers to offer composition classes for college credit. She has also collaborated on several projects aiming to increase instructors awareness of and ability to respond to power dynamics in the classroom, including Queer Pedagogical Performance and Critical Classrooms. She has further worked in both teaching and organizing roles with a number of Puget Sound non-profits that provide higher education inside prisons, including University Beyond Bars and Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.
Chelsea Jennings (Department of English), Mentor: Amaranth Borsuk.
Chelsea Jennings is a doctoral candidate in English and Textual Studies at UW Seattle. Her research explores the significance of the printed book—as a unit of meaning, a sculptural and visual object, and a consumer good—to American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. A major focus of her teaching is how the materiality of texts impacts literary meaning. A poet, bookbinder, and aspiring letterpress printer herself, Jennings teaches courses that integrate academic and artistic forms of knowledge and that emphasize inquiry and collaboration. She has served as an Assistant Director in the Expository Writing Program and an organizer for Queer Pedagogical Performance, and she is currently taking part in a collaborative project on Interactive Theatre as Pedagogy.
Courses: BIS 361 Studies in American Literature; BISIA 374 Arts Workshop: Artist's Book.
Gladys Jian (Department of Anthropology), Mentor: Crispin Thurlow.
Gladys Jian studies sociocultural anthropology, and her general research interests include 1) language ideology and politics, language and identity; 2) the English language and globalization; 3) political economy, modernity, nationalism and transnationalism; 4) ethnic relations; and 5) translation studies and politics of translation. Her geographic research areas include China, East Asia and Central Asia. Her dissertation is an ethnography of the individual efforts and collective struggles of the Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur youth aspiring to cosmopolitan lives in China to maintain their ethno-linguistic identities in the face of covert monolingual language policy that favors Mandarin Chinese.
Courses: BIS 317 Language, Society and Cultural Knowledge; BISGST 397 Politics of Representation in China.
Natasha Hakimali Merchant (Department of Education), Mentor: Wayne Au.
Natasha Merchant is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education at UW Seattle. Her research investigates the experiences of sectarian-minority Muslim girls and their perceptions of how Islam and Muslims are taught in their World History high-school classrooms. Natasha has taught several courses for pre-service teachers at UW Tacoma including Social Studies Methods, Multicultural Education, and Critical Issues in Assessment. Her passion for teaching and learning extends into, and originates from, her community, where she has spent years developing curriculum for religious education, working with youth to address issues of difference and identity, and building partnerships across communities to address issues of inequity, particularly around gender-based violence.
Courses: BEDUC 260 Culture, Knowledge and Education; BEDUC 330 Race, Culture and Identity.
Dana Prince (Department of Social Work), Mentor: Janelle Silva.
Dana Prince is a doctoral candidate in Social Welfare. Her research and teaching are grounded in over ten years of school- and community-based public health practice with diverse youth. She has taught in public middle and high schools in West Philadelphia, as well as undergraduate and graduate level courses. She views education as both a critical form of social capital and a means of cultivating engaged participation in community life. To this end, her pedagogy is informed by experiential inquiry, real-world problem solving and a core belief in education as a vehicle for individual and collective empowerment and social change. Research areas of interest include academic and health outcomes for historically marginalized and underserved youth, the role of place and environment in youth identity formation, school-based intervention, and mixed methodology.
Courses: BIS 312 Approaches to Social Research; BIS293 Special Topics: Youth Development.
Susan Waters (Department of Biology), Mentor: Warren Gold.
Susan Waters studies the effects of climate change on species interactions. Her current work examines the effects of earlier springs—changing the timing of flowering—on interactions between native and exotic plants and their shared pollinators. She is also the co-founder of the Urban Pollination Project, a piece of collaborative academic/public citizen science research aiming to assess the status of bumble bee activity and effectiveness of bumble bee pollination for crop plants grown in urban community gardens. She is a former high school biology teacher at a school for the performing arts and loves to teach science at any level to anybody.
Courses: BES 301 Science Methods and Practice; BIS 390 Ecology and the Environment.
PIP Fellows for 2012-2013:
In 2012-13, five UW doctoral students served as fellows in the seventh year of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP). Jed Murr, a member of the 2011-12 PIP cohort, served as the second year mentor for 2012-13.
Damarys Espinoza (Mentor: Julie Shayne). Damarys Espinoza is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at UW Seattle. Her primary research interest is in indigenous health and wellness with a focus on intimate partner violence, structural violence, and community resilience. Her dissertation investigates the impact of rural-to-urban migration, ethnicity, and class on indigenous women’s vulnerability to violence in Peru. She is passionate about teaching and has taught in diverse environments, from community-based workshop settings to community college and undergraduate classrooms.
Courses: BISGST 397 Topics in Global Studies: Gender Violence and Social Change (Autumn & Spring); BIS 293 Special Topics: Rethinking Diversity (Winter).
David Giles (Mentor: Crispin Thurlow). David Giles is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at UW Seattle. His research explores political-economic landscapes of waste and abjection in globalizing cities like Seattle, and the countercultural social forms which emerge from them. He writes about the decentralized networks of Food Not Bombs, a global movement that publicly redistributes food wasted by local markets. He has taught interdisciplinary courses emphasizing student-centered pedagogy, intercultural understanding, and epistemological self-reflection (or, as he calls it, "taking responsibility for the consequences of your generalizations") in Anthropology and Comparative History of Ideas at UWS.
Courses: BISGST 397 Topics in Global Studies: International Protest Movements (Autumn & Spring); BIS 275 Social Problems (Winter).
Carolina Gómez-Posada (Mentor: Santiago Lopez). Carolina Gómez-Posada is a doctoral candidate in Biology at UW Seattle. Her work focuses on the ecology and conservation of primates in Colombia, where she runs a project evaluating the potential for bamboo forest agroecosystems to foster primate population conservation in a highly fragmented landscape. She has experience training undergraduate students in field research methods and analysis. She encourages her students to observe their surroundings, to ask and answer questions that help them to understand natural phenomena and conservation issues in their own community, and to reflect on the implications to the larger world.
Courses: BES 312 Ecology (Autumn & Winter); BES 316 Ecological Methods (Spring)
Jed Murr (Second-Year PIP Mentor). Jed Murr is a doctoral candidate in English at UW Seattle. Working with the Race/Knowledge Project (RKP), he collaborates to understand the circulation of race and racism within the dynamics of the global university in general and within discourses of "multiculturalism" and "colorblindness" in particular. In its efforts to develop practices that exceed traditional disciplinary and pedagogical boundaries, the RKP brings together various cultural workers and activists to speak with and to different audiences at UW.
Courses: BIS 293 Special Topics: Introduction to Cultural Studies (Autumn & Spring), BIS 371 20th-Century American Literature (Winter).
Alice Pederson (Mentor: Camille Walsh). Alice Pederson is a doctoral candidate in English at UW Seattle. Her research traces the politics of empathy in 19th and 20th-century literature. She was the Assistant Director of the Expository Writing program. She is the Co-Chair of the Critical Classrooms Committee, which facilitates graduate student work in radical and engaged pedagogy. Her teaching interests include law and literature, gender and human rights, and the development of the genre of the slave narrative in modern and contemporary literature.
Courses: BIS 341 Topics in the Study of Culture: Law, Rights, and Literature (Autumn & Spring); BIS 361 Studies in American Literature: Slave Narratives and their Legacies (Winter).
Kellie Wills (Mentor: Andrea Stone). Kellie Wills is a doctoral students in Educational Psychology at UW Seattle. She holds an M.A. in Applied Statistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests focus on Bayesian statistical methods for hierarchical data. She has extensive experience teaching introductory statistics at the community college and university levels. She strives to engage students with statistics as discourse across disciplines, and emphasizes the development of quantitative literacy through metacognition and visualization.
Courses: BIS 232 Using, Understanding, and Visualizing Quantitative Data (Autumn); BIS 315 Understanding Statistics (Winter & Spring).
PIP Fellows for 2011-2012:
Robertson Allen (Department of Anthropology, mentored by Crispin Thurlow).
Carrie Lanza (Department of Social Welfare, mentored by Kari Lerum).
Rachel Mitchell (Department of Forest Resouces, mentored by Dave Stokes).
Jed Murr (Department of English, mentored by Ben Gardner).
Nicole Torres (Department of Anthropology, mentored by Leslie Ashbaugh).
Simón Trujillo (Department of English, second year PIP mentor).
PIP Fellows for 2010-2011:
Amy Bhatt (Department of Women's Studies, mentored by Diane Gillespie).
Madhavi Murty (Department of Communication, mentored by Ron Krabill).
Jentery Sayers (Department of English, mentored by Ted Heibert).
Simón Trujillo (Department of English, mentored by David Goldstein).
Sally Warner (Department of Physical Oceanography, mentored by Rob Turner).
Sam Yum (Department of Antropology, second year PIP mentor).
PIP Fellows 2009-2010:
Kristin Gustafson (Department of Communication, mentored by Constantin Behler).
Tim Jones (Department of Political Science, second year PIP mentor ).
Sydney Lewis (Department of English, mentored by Kari Lerum).
Trang X. Ta (Department of Anthropology, mentored by Martha Groom).
Amoshaun Toft (Department of Communications, mentored by Susan Harewood).
Bryan White (Department of Neurobiology, mentored by Marc Servetnick).
PIP Fellows 2008-2009:
Tami Blumenfield (Department of Anthropology, mentored by Diane Gillespie).
Shauna Carlisle (School of Social Work, second year PIP mentor).
Caren Crandell (College of Forest Resources, mentored by Bill Seaburg).
Erica Gunn: (Department of Chemistry, mentored by Becca Price).
Tim Jones (Department of Political Science, mentored by Colin Danby).
Fernanda Oyarzun (Department of Biology, mentored by Cinnamon Hillyard).
Samuel Yum (Department of Anthropology, mentored by Linda Watts).
PIP Fellows 2007-2008:
Shauna Carlisle (Department of Social Work; mentored by Elizabeth Thomas)
Amy Lambert (Department of Forest Resources; mentored by Linda Watts)
Kevin Ramsey (Department of Geography; mentored by Ron Krabill)
Rebeca Rivera (Department of Environmental Anthropology; mentored by Warren Gold)
Stephanie Scopelitis (Department of Educational Psychology; mentored by Jeanne Heuving)
PIP Fellows 2006-2007:
Melanie Kill (Department of English; mentored by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren)
Georgia Roberts (Department of English; mentored by Ron Krabill)
Jeanette Sanchez (Department of Theater History and Criticism; mentored by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren)
Matthew Sneddon (Department of History; mentored by Linda Watts)
Sarah Starkweather (Department of Geography; mentored by Colin Danby)
Generous support for the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy has been provided by the UW Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation, the UW Bothell Office of Academic Affairs, the UW Bothell Teaching and Learning Center, and the IAS program.