Institutional Activities
Most recently I have been active as a Graduate Lilly Teaching Fellow through UMD's Center for Teaching Exellence (pictured on the right). Through this program I have worked with other graduate students interested in teaching and learning to develop an online tool for faculty to assess student’s classroom expectations at the beginning of a semester. This survey incorporated student and faculty feedback and has been presented at the DC Lilly Conference on College & University Teaching in May 2012. Additionally it has led to presentations at our institutional Teaching and Learning Conference, Graduate Teaching Orientation, and several special workshops. A longer description of our work, and the survey itself can be found here. This work has also led to several publications, of which I am the lead or co-lead author on.I have also served on the Policy committee for the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at UMD for the past 3 years.
Farther in the past, during my time as an undergraduate I served on Wittenberg University’s Lutheran Identity Task-force, a small university-wide endeavor that helped reformulate Wittenberg’s educational and institutional goals to reflect a ‘Lutheran perspective’ on higher education. The resulting recommendations had significant impact across the university. I found this particularly valuable in articulating my own views as the Lutheran perspective focuses not only on intellectual development but also a holistic growth of moral, social, and civic thought and engagement independent of a religious bias, a viewpoint I identify closely with.