Maeve Hooper

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Senior Instructional Professor; Director of the German Language Program

Maeve Hooper oversees all aspects of the German language program at the University of Chicago, including curricular design and articulation, assessment development, and the pedagogical training of graduate students. She works closely with her fellow instructional faculty members in the German, Yiddish, and Norwegian language programs, and greatly appreciates the collaborative spirit with which we approach language pedagogy in our department. As an instructor, she is committed to helping students at all levels of German develop language proficiency and intercultural competence through a task-based, communicative approach. She teaches at every level of the program, though most often in the second-year sequence. Most recently, Dr. Hooper developed an intermediate course that prepares students to discuss and analyze, in German, works of art in their historical and cultural contexts. She received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago in 2018. Dr. Hooper’s scholarly work has focused primarily on German Romanticism, Poetic Realism, and narratology.

Russell P. Johnson

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Director

Russell Johnson’s research focuses on religious ethics and the philosophy of communication, specifically the ways “us versus them” frameworks shape people's imaginations and behavior in social conflicts. Several of the courses he teaches, including “Star Wars and Religion” and “Villains: Evil in Philosophy, Religion, and Film,” analyze popular films to consider the tendency to think about political conflict in terms of good guys versus bad guys, which often oversimplifies the moral landscape. He has also taught courses in the Humanities Core and is currently helping develop and teach in the new SOSC Core sequence, “Religion: Cosmos, Conscience, and Community.” One of his goals as a teacher is to help students realize that ethics, religion, and philosophy are not abstract topics “out there.” They can be found in the video games we play, the news stories we read, the memes we share, and the decisions we make every day. Dr. Johnson finds that UChicago students are terrific at drawing connections between centuries-old ideas and present-day culture, and that conservations in class always enrich his appreciation for the texts we read and the questions we discuss.

Valerie Levan

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Humanities Core Pedagogy Coordinator

Valerie Levan began her teaching career as a graduate student at the University of Chicago teaching Elementary German for Beginners. She is trained in German language pedagogy and writing pedagogy, and served as a Writing Intern and Academic and Professional Writing Lector before beginning a full-time position as an Instructor in the Humanities Core. As a graduate of the Department of Comparative Literature, Valerie enjoys her work in the Core for the continued opportunities it provides to encourage students to seek connections and resonance among a diverse range of texts. Valerie also serves as the Humanities Core Pedagogy Coordinator and in that position works to create programming that gives new and experienced instructors a chance to reflect on and improve their teaching practice. Valerie has read The Odyssey seventeen times (and counting!), and when not teaching or thinking about teaching, she enjoys spending time with her husband, two daughters, and five chickens.

Shaunna McLeod

2022-23 Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Instructional Professor

Shaunna joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Instructional Professor in Autumn 2020 after completing her PhD in Chemistry at Northwestern University. During her graduate studies, Shaunna developed as an educator through programming at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, serving as a Graduate Teaching Fellow and Teaching Consultant. At UChicago, Shaunna teaches in the Comprehensive General Chemistry sequence, a set of introductory chemistry courses that serves 300-400 undergraduate students each quarter. She also designed and taught a new Physical Sciences general education course, the Chemistry of Food and Cooking, which focuses on building science literacy skills for non-science majors. Shaunna's pedagogical interests include active learning strategies, inclusive assessment practices, and teaching assistant training and development.

Gina Pieters

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Associate Senior Instructional Professor & Associate Director of Instructional Programs in the Committee on Education

Dr. Pieters has over a decade of experience teaching Economics in the higher education environment. She began at the University of Minnesota, ultimately teaching 200+ students in introductory macroeconomics each semester, managing a team of TAs, and setting the curriculum. She then transitioned to a smaller liberal arts setting in Texas, teaching seminar-style upper division undergraduate courses in international economics. She has been at the University of Chicago since 2018 where she has taught or co-taught twelve different courses ranging from principles of macroeconomics, to the calculus-based undergraduate economics core sequence, to business economics electives, to an MA seminar in Financial Mathematics.Regardless of course level, her focus is on holistic course design with a special focus on growth-encouraging assessments.

Lisa Rosen

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Associate Senior Instructional Professor & Associate Director of Instructional Programs in the Committee on Education

Lisa Rosen’s research focuses on the relationship between education and social inequality and the social context of urban schooling. She is co-author of The Ambitious Elementary School, a 2017 book which examines a radical new model for elementary school organization that approaches the social causes of educational inequality head-on. As Associate Director of Instructional Programs in the Committee on Education, Dr. Rosen is involved in the design and academic administration of the Committee’s curricular offerings at both the graduate and undergraduate level. These programs include an undergraduate minor in Education and Society, which she co-directs, as well as a certificate program for MA students. She teaches discussion based, seminar-style courses for both undergraduate and graduate students, including “Education and Social Inequality,” “Schooling and Identity,” and “Language, Culture and Education.” Her pedagogical goals include learning new techniques from her fellow Pedagogy Fellows, expanding her repertoire of strategies for assessing student learning, and deepening her capacity to support the professional learning of other instructors in the Education and Society program. She loves teaching the students who choose her classes because of the intensity and passion they bring to class discussions and their commitment to helping improve educational outcomes and opportunities for students from marginalized communities.

Matthias Staisch

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Associate Director & Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Committee on International Relations

Matthias teaches CIR's core seminar on international political economy as well as courses on international organization and network theory. He oversees CIR's curricular and extracurricular programs, which now include international seminars in South and East Asia, career exploration treks to global cities in the U.S., an international internship program, and a PhD application clinic. As a teacher, he is committed to nurturing classroom spaces that model academic knowledge as a welcoming and creative project of informed disagreement. A German citizen, Matthias is a UChicago alum, holding PhD and MA degrees from the Department of Political Science.

Megan Tusler

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Instructional Professor

Megan Tusler received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2015. She is currently an Assistant Instructional Professor working for the MA Program in the Humanities, where she teaches the MAPH Core Foundations of Interpretive Theory) and advises theses, as well as teaching grad/undergrad courses in American Ethnic Literature such as “21st Century US Ethnic Literature,” “Literature and Citizenship,” and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.” She has also taught in the HUM Core in the “Reading Cultures” sequence, and a course called “Indigenous Literatures” for the Chicago Academic Achievement Program. Her academic writing concerns modern and contemporary US ethnic literatures and archival practices, literature and photography, and affect studies. She has been a faculty fellow for the Ayer Collection of American Indian Studies at the Newberry Library and a collections evaluator for the Chicago History Museum. In her spare time she enjoys thrift shopping and sewing, and is the co-host of the podcast Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective. She is a member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union.

Erin Galgay Walsh

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Professor

Erin Galgay Walsh is an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the Divinity School and College. In addition to teaching introductory classes on topics and texts within the history of Christianity and Late Antiquity, she has designed several courses around themes such as gender and sexuality, religion and literature, and ethics. She has incorporated game-based learning and various interactive strategies in her classes and enjoys bringing innovative pedagogical approaches to the religious studies classroom. The curiosity of undergraduate students moves her to look at the literature of the ancient world in ever more creative ways, inspiring her work as both a teacher and a researcher. Currently, she serves as the Director of the Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies and the Teaching Fellows Program within the Divinity School.

Jancey Wickstrom

Associate Pedagogy Fellow
Assistant Instructional Professor

Jancey Wickstrom is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Social Work Educator. She has been teaching at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice for seven years, and before that her social work career focused on treating individuals with eating disorders, self-harm, and addiction issues using third wave behavioral theories. At Crown, her focus is teaching social justice-informed clinical skills to Master’s Level Students. She is also the Coordinator of the Contextual Behavioral Practice Program of Study. She sees a lot of parallels between the practice and education of Social Work, including the imperative to bring critical self-awareness, reflexivity, and humility to both. Fostering Crown students’ development as social workers brings her joy, not only to see them grow in their abilities, but also to consider the impact they will have in their eventual careers. She’s excited to join the Pedagogy Fellowship to further develop her skills in facilitating impactful classroom discussion, designing effective course structures, and making social work education accessible and meaningful to all students.