Julia Metzker
Executive Director
School of Business Administration
Stetson University
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Julia Metzker currently serves as Executive Director at the Brown Center for Faculty Innovation and Excellence. She received a B. S. from The Evergreen State College where she learned first-hand the value of a transformative liberal arts education. She worked collaboratively with fellow chemists do develop an introductory course that explores basic principles of chemistry through the lens of pressing issues of pollution and climate change. This course spawned a national workshop, Using the climate debate to revitalize general chemistry, in 2014 offered through the NSF-funded Chemistry, Collaborations, Workshops and Communities of Scholars (www.ccwcs.org). Examples of her work incorporating community engagement into the student experience include a course titled "The Science and Sociology of your Food" in which students completed a community food assessment and local food guide as well as an ongoing research project to assess the health and quality of soils in communities. Dr. Metzker is a founding member of an inclusive collaboration of higher educators, known as the Innovative Course-building Group (icbg.wordpress.com), who provide professional development around issues of learning. As a co-founder of IC-bG, she promotes curricular innovation by mentoring faculty across institutions and disciplines to use civic issues and active pedagogies as a catalyst for designing engaging courses that result in important student learning. Julia has a diverse portfolio of faculty development work, ranging from guiding educators through the process of reframing the content in their courses using civic issues to designing values-based assessment strategies to developing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects. In addition to designing and executing a successful summer institute, she has facilitated teaching and learning workshops at a variety of universities and conferences.
Research Interest
Innovative pedagogies, Liberal Arts curriculum, Curricular coherence, Community-based learning, Bioinorganic chemistry
