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 2012-2013:
IAS is happy to announce that five UW doctoral students have been selected from a highly-competitive pool and will be teaching in 2012-2013 as fellows in the seventh year of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP). Jed Murr, a member of the 2011-12 PIP cohort, will serve as a 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: 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:
IAS is happy to announce that five UW doctoral students have been selected from a highly-competitive pool and will be teaching in 2011-2012 as fellows in the sixth year of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (PIP). Simón Trujillo, a member of the fifth cohort of PIP fellows from 2010-11, will serve as a second year mentor for 2011-12.
Robertson Allen (mentored by Crispin Thurlow). Rob Allen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. He has considerable experience in teaching interdisciplinary writing and English, as well as a variety of courses in anthropology, and is interested in developing courses that critically explore digital games, militarization, and labor. Courses: BIS 236 Introduction to Interactive Media (Games and Gaming: Autumn & Spring), BISMCS 471 Advanced Topics in Media and Communication Studies: Technologies of Militarization and War Games (Winter).
Areas of teaching interest: Visual Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, Media and Labor Studies, and the Anthropology of War and Violence.
Carrie Lanza (mentored by Kari Lerum). Carrie Lanza is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Welfare. She sees her teaching, social work practice, creative and scholarly work as an integrated whole that are connected by a common ethos of critical pedagogy. She is exploring themes of identity and place in both her teaching and research practice, including her study of the evolution of practice methods in maternal and child health, and her explorations of arts-based practices for community building, social action, and decolonization. Her teaching has included a course in Community-Based Participatory Media, and work with Ratnesh Nagda in teaching Intergroup Dialogue. Courses: BIS 293: Foundations for Social Services (Autumn & Spring), BIS 445 Meanings and Realities of Inequality (Winter).
Areas of teaching interest: Methods in Maternal and Child Health, Arts-Based Practice for Community Building, Social Action and Decolonization.
Rachel Mitchell (mentored by Dave Stokes). Rachel Mitchell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Forest Resouces. She is a restoration ecologist who focuses on invasive species and plant community ecology. Through her teaching at the high school level, she developed a commitment to improving scientific communication skills. With two others, she designed a speaker series and graduate seminar to teach grad students how to engage the public in research through story telling using improvisational arts, film, story telling, and discussion. Students from this seminar present their work in the “Engage Science Speaker Series” (www.engage-science.com). Courses: BIS 396 Topics in Sustainability: Food Production, Safety, and Security (Autumn & Spring), BIS 393: Communicating Science (Winter).
Areas of teaching interest: Improving Scientifc Communication Skills, Invasive Species and Plant Community Ecology.
Jed Murr (mentored by Ben Gardner). Jed Murr is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English. Working with the Race/Knowledge Project, 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. He has taught a wide range of courses in English, American Studies, Geography and International Studies. Courses: BIS 293: Introduction to Cultural Studies (Autumn & Spring), BIS 282 Globalization (Winter).
Areas of teaching interest: Engaging Race, Racism, Cultures of Globalization and Violence, and the Politics of Memory and Forgetting in the Contemporary U.S.
Nicole Torres (mentored by Leslie Ashbaugh). Nicole Torres is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore how humans perceive their realities through language, images, and built environments. She has taught both in Anthropology and for Cornish College of the Arts, where she has taught similar courses that explore issues using interdisciplinary research assignments that include experiential components. Courses: BISSTS 397: Topics in Science, Technology, and Society: Medicine, Illness and Culture (Autumn & Spring), BIS 314: Topics in Geography: Borders, Boundaries and Borderlands in the U.S. (Winter).
Areas of teaching interest: Language, Visual Representation, and the Importance of Narrative in the Social Ecology of Militarization.
Simón Trujillo (second year PIP mentor). Simón Trujillo was a PIP fellow in 2010-2011 and is a doctoral candidate in English at UW Seattle. His research investigates the cultural politics of the New Mexican land-grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. He has taught courses in the English Department where his pedagogy frames cultural work as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry, one in which students are able cultivate knowledge projects that intersect multiple disciplinary domains and public spheres. He is a co-organizer of the UW Race/Knowledge Project.
Areas of teaching interest: Chicana/o Studies; African-American Studies; American Ethnic Cultural Studies
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)
Want more information?
If you have questions about PIP, contact the 2008-2009 Co-Directors: Bruce Burgett (burgett@u.washington.edu), Martha Groom (groom@u.washington.edu), or David Goldstein (DGoldstein@uwb.edu).
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.