Dr. Julie Shayne is the UW Bothell recipient of the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019. Her classes focus on politics, poverty, and resistance in the Global South, typically through the lenses of gender and feminism.
Becca
We have a badass womxn on campus: Professor Julie Shayne. Dr. Shayne teaches BIS 277: Womxn in the Global South. While students are reading, analyzing, and discussing texts on that topic, they also write their own pressbooks about Badass Womxn & Enbies in the Pacific Northwest. Each class makes their own Pressbook, and Dr. Shayne’s students are now working on the 4th edition. The books feature short biographies of badasses that students have written, as well as their teamwork to edit and compile the biographies, add cover art, write author bios, construct a name for their collaboration, and formulate a manifesto. The project weaves individual and group contributions together in a way that develops amazing pride.
So many epiphanies inspired Dr. Shayne. There’s the wonderful Rad Women book series, for one, and also Dr. Shayne’s love for incorporating children’s books like these into her courses. But there’s also amazing support for creative pedagogy here at UWB that led to more epiphanies. For the Badass series, Dr. Shayne collaborates with librarians who are badass womxn and enbies, like Denise Hattwig (Head of Digital Scholarship) and Penelope Wood (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Librarian). Hattwig helps students learn pressbook as a tool for publishing; Wood helps students find Badass folx to write about and find resources to learn about those folx.
I learned several teaching tips from Dr. Shayne–as I always do when talking to her.
- If we don’t record these stories, who will? This is a key concept in feminist studies.
- Students can select their teams, but that selection process is practice for job applications. They offer their top choices along with explaining why they’re qualified and how they can grow through the experience. For example, someone who indicates that they want to work on contributors’ biographies because they want to celebrate the diverse strengths of their classmates has a better chance of joining the biography team than someone who only circled that choice.
- Students have the option to use an alias and may choose not to have their bio included. Students’ privacy wishes are maintained in openweb assignments.
- These pressbooks make an impact. Dr. Shayne mentioned that someone from a museum contacted her to talk about one of the images, and a reporter who wrote about the project in COLUMBIA: The Magazine of Northwest History. How cool to have students’ work be this visible.
- We can collaborate in our teaching in all kinds of ways: with peer facilitators, librarians, students, etc.
Usually when I contribute to these blogs, I use the first names of our guests. Here, I have no choice but to say Dr. Shayne. Why? Read the answer here.
Todd
The students creating this work are wonderful. Like all of our students, they are capable and often want to contribute to something other than a Canvas assignment that no one but the teacher ever sees. Sure, not every assignment needs to be visible to all the world, but something? Anything?
Except for a few rare teachers who put your schoolwork on the wall, usually a piece of art, or if you were lucky enough to have performance based classes, maybe a recital or something, most of your work never saw the light of day. I know in my case, while it was fun to look at 20 “handouts” a day from our kids, most ended up in the trash. Brutal, I know. And I am someone who literally still has boxes of my own students’ work from 20 years ago in my garage.
Anyway, it is lovely to be able to sit here and type these sentences and add a link that goes to some student work. I am pretty sure that in 1998, when my students and I started to make publicly available websites of our work, we would never have guessed how hard it is to find those things so many years down the road. We thought it was the bees knees that we were able to share our experiences with others across the globe.
I think this all gets to the very root of our community here. Where is our work? Where is our students work?
During our epiphany with Dr. Shayne, I was most challenged with a response from her about who is leading us towards similar work? She noted it was not her, and that the library might provide guidance. My interest is kinda selfish. I want to keep the Digital Scholarship WP and manifold options. I have never seen another instance of the kind of effort Dr. Shayne’s student’s did save the repeated versions of her own courses over the years. If not one is using that space, how long will it last? That is what bothered me.
How nice to spotlight Dr. Shayne and her students. And I feel lucky, on occasion, to still exchange dahlia photos with my friend, Julie.