Relevant Experience

Current Roles

Open Educational Resources (OER) Teaching Assistant

This year, I am working as the Open Educational Resources Teaching Assistant in the College of Letters and Sciences. I work with professors who are interested in producing interactive, open educational resources for use in their teaching. My primary projects include:

• consulting with instructors who want to discuss active learning tools and outlining technical steps they can take to implement these tools
• creating a teaching activity sourcebook to outline the affordances of OER digital textbooks for an audience of campus instructors

Gullickson Fellow (College of Letters and Science)

The College of Letters and Sciences recently received support to fund two graduate TAships for candidates who have demonstrated a commitment to teaching. As a Gullickson Fellow, I collaborate with the administration of the College of Letters and Sciences to identify and address the challenges that TAs face at UW-Madison. My main projects at present are to:

• conducting focus groups and interviews with instructors on campus in order to identify future projects L&S can implement during the summer and fall
• researching the workplace challenges that teaching assistants face with the end-goal of producing a resource that outlines ways that UW-Madison’s departments can better support a diverse TA community

Both of these positions are intended to extend from Spring 2018 to the end of the Fall 2018 semester. 

Public Humanities Experience

My museum experience was a long time ago, but I bring it up in this rationale statement because it makes a strong case for my investment in multimodal teaching materials. 

Teaching museum experience

I have a long record of being drawn to interdisciplinary public humanities projects. For all four years of undergrad, I worked as the assistant to the director and collections manager of the Wright Museum of Art. As part of this position, I curated two exhibits for the museum: one titled “Women in Shakespeare” and another titled “Illustrations, Illuminations, and the Bound Image.” Each exhibit considered the relationship between literature and artistic representations–(that is, images, comics, and sculptures). As curator, I also worked with professors to coordinate class visits to my exhibits. This involved making connections between the museum collections and student courses and facilitating large-group conversations about them with fellow undergraduate students. This early experience is in keeping with my current project’s commitment to forming broader connections outside of the narrow bounds of academic genres.

Design experience

Between undergrad and grad school, I worked as a project assistant in the Exhibitions and Collections department of the San Diego Museum of Art. I worked closely with the museum’s graphic designer to produce visual media and museum labels for exhibits and special events. This required me to learn how to use an array of design software very quickly.  This position also helped me learn about some of the design, accessibility, and inclusivity considerations associated with producing work for a broad audience.