Teaching

[The image shows faculty and students from Creighton University and Karoli Gaspar University in Budapest, Hungary. We spent a whole day  together in Budapest learning from each other and together about  definitions of health and implications for care (photograph by anonymous student).]

I am currently teaching undergraduate medical anthropology courses on global health and the American healthcare system as well as a course on needs assessment and program evaluation. When teaching the global health course, I take a biosocial and justice-oriented approach. When teaching about healthcare, I emphasize service-learning in order to understand health and care issues and situate healthcare within public health and contextualize health, illness and care through a focus on social and cultural issues. When teaching needs assessment and program evaluation, I pay attention to research, analytical and presentation skills development through students working with a social service agency to develop an assessment/evaluation project. Previously, I developed and taught an undergraduate anthropology introductory course with a focus on sociocultural determinants of health, an undergraduate cultural epidemiology course, a graduate seminar in medical anthropology, a graduate course in public health anthropology, and a graduate course in global health.

Mentoring students, who are committed to learning, during research projects and helping them to prepare the research outcomes for conference presentations, community applications, and publication is one of my passions. I am proud of students, such as:

• Michelle Skaff (undergraduate student), who studied how increased financial literacy among low-income single mothers posititively impacts their and their households' overall health and wellbeing.
• Andrew Smith (undergraduate student), who explored dynamics of gang formation among refugee youth.
• Kartavya Vyas (graduate student), who researched the psychological impact of medical humanitarian missions on military members.
• Peter Thomas (graduate student), who used a mixed-methods approach to understand the impact of group exercise on the overall health and wellbeing of individuals regularly participating in group exercise.
• Cathy Orr (graduate student), who studied emerging attitudes towards vaping in the vaping community.
• Stephanie Kohl (graduate student), who explored the experience of the U-Visa application process of undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic and other forms of violence.
• Allison Lai, Zachary Meyer, Jocelyn Wu and their colleagues (medical students), who research the impact of medical service learning programs' impact on intercultural competence dedevelopment of medical and health professional students.
• Erin Young (graduate student), who studied physician and patient satisfaction with charity care in Utah.
• Kevin Boes (undergraduate student), who assessed an Omaha swing dance club's potential as a formative space. The paper based on his research was published in Quest.

Outside the classroom, I have experience and expertise with teaching workshops on intercultural competence for groups of professionals and community-based organizations. Also, I am a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory.