Although we are introducing to our community now, you have been with The Collaborative for a bit over a year. What has your first year been like and what are you hoping to accomplish as you progress in your position as Faculty Development Coordinator? 

It has been a combination of a whirlwind and the common metaphor of drinking from a fire hose. I've gotten to meet a lot of people. I've learned a lot about Trinity, about Trinity students, and how Trinity works. What I want to accomplish is getting to see more of what the brilliant professors are doing in the classroom, so I'd love to see more of the kind of innovative pedagogical work that they're doing, and witness it, and learn from it.

You are a Texas native and have spent time learning both within and outside of this state. What influence do you think your previous educational experiences have on the ways that you teach and interact with students here at Trinity? 

Being from a small town in West Texas, I think that gives me kind of a grounded perspective of where a lot of students are coming from, especially those students that are Texan and maybe come from a small town or a smaller High School. That informs it  [how she teaches and interacts with students], and being pretty familiar with San Antonio, and having lived here before, I'm pretty aware of what it's like to live here and be from here. Even though I'm not from San Antonio, I think the educational system in Texas and being familiar with it is important, especially for people who work with first year students, because they're coming out of that system, and they're still used to how that works, so just understanding where they're coming from can put you on a better ground when you're planning out your syllabi and and also just trying to connect with students.

You are a scholar of the Classics discipline, which some people may say is sunsetting as of now. To you, what makes Classics a living, dynamic field today and how do you hope your work contributes to the vitality of the field? 

I am fairly biased, but I don't feel as though we're experiencing a sunset. I mean, the nice thing about sunsets is that there's always a sunrise. There's a brand new television show called Kaos about Greek mythology, and there've been many recent bestsellers about Greek mythology, so I think that will never die. I think students remain fascinated by the ancient world. Sometimes what's needed is fresh perspectives on it and the Trinity Classics department provides that. Students get a really exciting and dynamic education that can often be accompanied by trips abroad and experiences in museums and hands-on learning. Yeah, I think that there are some things that are discouraging about being a person who's part of the field, but I think that's true of humanities too. But it's nice to be at Trinity, at a place that values those disciplines and sees them as contributing to students in a deep way that they'll carry with them. Learning more skilled up, tied to our contemporary situation, [classics content] is going to benefit our students well.

In addition to teaching in the Classics department, you are also our faculty development coordinator here in The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching. What does your work in that role mean to you and what is it like to not only be an educator but to also simultaneously work to develop educators? 

My work in The Collaborative is so important to me because it's about building community and it's not so much about teaching people how to teach, as it is witnessing how they teach, being a sounding board for their ideas and their brilliant pedagogical innovations that they want to try out, and bringing in the scholarship of teaching and learning to speak to what they're already doing and talking about. Yeah, what I enjoy most about working in The Collaborative is getting people from different disciplines and hearing from them about the ways that they think, the ways that they construct meaning in their work and in their teaching, and carrying that with me in my own teaching.