I regularly teach elective courses such as: “Peoples and Cultures of Africa,” “Gender in Africa,” “Feast or Famine: The Ecology and Politics of Food,” “Political Anthropology,” “Women and Development,” and “Gender and Social Organization.” My major core course rotations include: a First Year Seminar, “Magical Hair,” “Research Methods,” “Seminar on Anthropological Theory,” and “Senior Seminar”

I am very interested in linking student learning inside the classroom and the library to applied experience in the outside world. For example, I provide historical research opportunities to students in my First Year Seminar (FYS) in the Wheaton Archives.

Students enrolled in Research Methods practice a range of qualitative data gathering research techniques in a social setting of their choice. My Feast or Famine course, was transformed, with a grant from the Hewlett-Mellon Foundation, into a “super-infused” experiential learning course where students create a campus-wide feast to honor the life work of Mahatma Gandhi, volunteer at a local food bank, and direct a dinner/speaker series on contemporary food issues such as fair trade, community assisted agriculture, and organic farming.  (Food for Thought)

I am particularly excited about the blended-learning digital field course that I originated in 2010, “Tanzania: Education and Development,” which provides the opportunity for me to take students into the field for the month of June to study development challenges in Africa for the 21^st Century. This course enables students to learn a qualitative research skill set that includes extensive interviewing, field recording, and observations in two different urban settings, and two weeks of volunteer teaching in an English language enrichment program for secondary school students in a rural village. I also enjoy experimenting with different project-based learning opportunities with technology in my courses.

In 2012 I introduced a “Dining Around the Dimple” blog assignment into the Feast and Famine course. Students were asked to create several blog posts (and comment on others’) on anything involving food consumption at Wheaton or the surrounding community and to capture a visual image to illustrate their post.

In the most recent Women and Development class we used the 2015 benchmarks of the Millennium Development Goals to track the progress of countries around the globe in meeting targets in areas such as education, maternal and infant health, and clean water that impact women and their dependents.  Students worked in teams to mine and visualize data from a variety of sources in order to measure world progress in fighting poverty and inequality.