Instructional Design

As an instructional designer, my areas of expertise include:

Here’s a snapshot of my recent work in instructional design at Vassar College and the University of Michigan (UM):

In my seminar “The German Invention of Sexuality,” I will be participating in the Student Teacher Engaged Pedagogical Partnership (STEPP), a pedagogical partnership program at Vassar College that centers intentional dialogue about teaching practices in a semester-long faculty-student collaboration. It focuses on building student-faculty relationships and empowering student voices while offering faculty an opportunity to receive constructive feedback and work collaboratively with a student partner to address teaching goals.

For Spring 2022, I have been awarded the Frances D. Fergusson Faculty Technology Exploration Fund to experiment with virtual reality and its benefits for language instruction. My students will be using this new technology to conduct original research on 1920s queer Berlin.

I founded and received college funding for a pedagogical working group among junior language faculty at Vassar. Working with colleagues across several different language programs ranging from Ancient Greek and Italian to Korean, we aim to foster collaboration between language programs; swap materials and expertise; and craft initiatives with students to promote foreign language learning in higher education.

At Vassar College, I am spearheading an initiative to decolonize and diversify the German Studies’ department’s curriculum, course offerings, and culture, including organizing and facilitating faculty workshops on equitable, inclusive, anti-racist, and queer pedagogy.

As a Graduate Student Instructor Consultant (GSIC) focusing in instructional design at UM, I offered one-on-one consultations with instructors on all aspects of the teaching and learning process, including: course design, instructional technology, active learning, assessments and evaluations, classroom climate, and inclusive teaching, and others. Additionally, I conducted classroom observations and midterm student feedback evaluations to craft in-depth narrative reports that combine qualitative and quantitative data to inform an instructor about their pedagogical strengths and areas of improvement.

I also served as an Instructional Technology GSIC at UM, consulting with instructors and running workshops about how to best incorporate and use digital media, instructional technologies, and online learning tools.

In the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at UM, I served on the Curriculum Committee, where I collaborated with faculty and administration to assess, design, and implement departmental our curricular policies, course offerings, programs, and student success. Specifically, I helped spearhead the department’s turn toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, organizing and facilitating workshops on anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive teaching.

In 2019, I earned my university’s Graduate Teaching Certificate, a four-year-long professional development program that, through several workshops and a semester-long seminar, trained in me the best practices of and latest innovations in collegiate-level teaching.