Dr. Richard Freishtat, Senior Consultant, Center for Teaching and Learning, UC Berkeley
I fell in love with teaching as a graduate student 15 years ago. Always feeling inadequate and wanting to know more about the art and science of teaching and learning, I pursued a Ph.D. in Education where I was able to begin practicing and studying effective pedagogy in the college classroom. In an unexpected career trajectory, I found myself applying the knowledge and skills I had acquired to faculty development and enrichment - first at a small, liberal arts university, and now at UC Berkeley where I facilitate programs and consult with faculty on a range of teaching-related topics. My own research interests span across the neuroscience of how the brain learns to narrative approaches to understanding how student learning happens in informal spaces, mostly through digital and new media. I want to make sense of why, and how, students learn willingly and engage enthusiastically in informal spaces that we can then draw on to improve traditional classroom learning. Ultimately, it is about seeking the gray spaces between the two realms of learning to draw on the intrinsic motivation of students and better connect their school learning with their lived realities.
Jane Hammons, Lecturer, College Writing Programs, UC Berkeley
I have taught writing for over 25 years at UC Berkeley, where I am the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award. I began teaching composition as a graduate student in the early 1980s and received my teacher training with the Bay Area Writing Project at UC Berkeley. As a writer, I readily grasped the importance of BAWP's belief that teachers of writing should write. My work has appeared in many print as well as online magazines and journals - Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers; Columbia Journalism Review; Creative Nonfiction; San Francisco Chronicle and Word Riot - and anthologized in Hint Fiction (W. W. Norton) and The Maternal is Political (Seal Press). I have used my experience as a writer to encourage (and require) students to write and publish on a variety of new media platforms. With such assignments comes the opportunity to discuss issues of self representation, intellectual property and responsible use of new media among other topics. These practices make stronger digital citizens of us all .
Dr. Kyle Livie,
Lecturer, California State University Monterey Bay Division of Humanities and Communications and San Francisco State University Department of History
I am a teacher and researcher in history and more broadly, the digital humanities, using new media alongside traditional approaches to scholarship in my history courses at the high school and university level. I want to help students understand the rigors of academia in order to be able to make it less rigorous in the sense of it being rigid and inflexible in a time of incredible opportunity and change in the world of written discourse. In my classes, I construct activities that seek to engage students as historians rather than as students of history, allowing them to "make history" for themselves and find ways to contribute those narratives, whether in traditional or digital form, to our broader understanding of the past.