Humanizing Teaching and Learning through Pedagogical Partnership
An ever-expanding body of evidence demonstrates benefits of pedagogical partnerships
for student and faculty development and learning. Student and faculty partners consistently
report enhanced empathy for each other, informed by insights into each other as humans
and the complexities inherent to learning and teaching. During this challenging time
for our institutions, as we support student learning after a global pandemic in the
context of complicated socio-political campus dynamics, might pedagogical partnerships
provide a way forward, grounded in principles of empathy, co-learning, and relationships?
This keynote will provide an overview of pedagogical partnership before presenting
the Being Human in STEM initiative, a student-faculty-staff partnership that arose
from a campus protest and has now been adapted across the country. What can be learned
from this experience, of partnering with students and helping students partner with
others, to inform how we help our institutions, our students, and ourselves prioritize
relationships, empathy, and care?
Sarah Bunnell, Ph.D.
Associate Director and STEM Specialist for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Amherst
College
Sarah L. Bunnell is the Associate Director and STEM Specialist for the Amherst College
Center for Teaching and Learning. In this work, she supports individual, departmental,
and institutional teaching and learning initiatives and efforts, including co-leading
the Amherst College Pedagogical Partners Program. Sarah is also a driving force behind
the Being Human in STEM Initiative (HSTEM), a national model for partnering with students
to humanize higher education (Bunnell, Lyster, & Jaswal, 2023; Routledge). She is
Past-President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
(ISSOTL). In 2022, she was awarded the ISSOTL Distinguished Service Award and the
Amherst College 1821 Collaboration Award. Prior to joining Amherst, she was an Associate
Professor of Psychology and Great Lakes Colleges Association Teagle Pedagogy Fellow
at Ohio Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental and Cognitive
Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from the University of Kansas.
