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By Catherine O'Donnell
UW News and Information
Shauna Carlisle
Jentery Sayers
Jentery Sayers and Shauna K. Carlisle, doctoral students at the University of Washington, have received the 2010 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The association chose nine of 200 students nominated for their promise as future leaders in higher education and civic affairs.
Sayers, 31, is a candidate in English literature and language. He holds a Society of Scholars fellowship at the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities for a dissertation on the cultural history of magnetic recordings.
New technology and the humanities interest Sayers a great deal, but in a corner of his office he keeps a 1958 Underwood typewriter. He explained, "I'm interested in how old technologies were once new.”
Sayers teaches undergraduates to blend history, fiction and digital technology. Most college students, he said, have grown up with digital technologies but many don’t understand them well enough to create audio, video, blogs and animations. Moreover, he said, humanities students “need to learn high-tech thinking without large wallets.”
In an English 111 course, Sayers helped his students animate print newsreels from U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos. In other classes, Sayers students have used free and open-source software to create e-books and share projects with community partners such the Boys and Girls Club of America. “Using and understanding digital tools enables students to look at everyday technology more critically,” Sayers said.
Carlisle, 37, is a candidate in social welfare. She is a fellow in the 2009-2010 Initiative for Community Based Learning and Scholarship at UW Bothell, where she’s also been a teaching fellow in the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy. She is writing a dissertation on factors associated with chronic respiratory, cardiovascular and pain problems in the U.S.
Carlisle chose social welfare because of chances to link theory with practice. Her students, for example, learn the hands-on research skills social service agencies need to document ways that they’re improving lives of their clients.
Carlisle’s students also work directly with clients. Some undergraduates, for example, helped Foundations for Early Learning, a Seattle nonprofit, determine how widely a brochure for parents had been disseminated and what parents thought of it. As part of the work, the students mapped recipients’ zip codes, showing the foundation where to concentrate further efforts.
For Carlisle, the work is all about using research for concrete purposes.“I heard my students say research methods had no relevance to their occupational pursuits. I wanted to change that.”