Center for Teaching & Learning Riley Caldwell-O'Keefe
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Please contact Riley if you need pedagogical support for curricular initiatives at the individual, departmental, and institutional level including consultations on assignment, course, and curriculum design, and assessment of student learning at all curricular levels. Please see the consultations page for more specifics about the ways that Riley can work with you to support teaching at Amherst College. Riley is the point person for inquiries about the operations and functions of the Center.
She has taught since her graduate days in Santa Barbara teaching introductory and advanced theatre and gender studies courses as well as first and second-year experience courses. Ask about her "Performance of Identity in the Classroom" course! It has been, so far, the best teaching experience of her career.
She has a background in performance studies and completed her doctorate at UC Santa Barbara in Theatre Studies with a Feminist Studies doctoral emphasis . She continues that scholarship, most recently giving a presentation on the military plays of Owen Dodson and, in the distant past, serving as the research advisor for a production of the World War II "Blueprint Specials" produced on the aircraft carrier Intrepid with Waterwell Theatre January 6th - 11th, 2017.
Riley's current SOTL research projects focus on implicit bias in course evaluations, students as pedagogical partners, and teaching and learning at small liberal arts colleges. Recent pedagogical publications:
Caldwell-O'Keefe, R. & Recla, M. (2020). “Slowly changing the world”: Embedding experiential learning to enhance ethics and diversity. In Sengupta, E., Blessinger, P. and Makhanya, M. (Eds.), Integrating community service into curriculum: International perspectives on humanizing education (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 25) (147-164). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Caldwell-O'Keefe, J. R., Boyd, D.E., Ashe, D., Bach, D., & Diede, M. (May 2020).Turning off the firehose and fostering community for the new professoriate: Five institutional perspectives on new faculty orientation." The Journal of Faculty Development. 34 (2), 59 - 68.