BLAKE DEAN, 20(c)
"The moment you stop learning, you stop leading"
- Rick Warren
Teaching Assistant for Human Sexuality
Signature learning experience
At Berry College, I work as an Office Manager for Dr. Conradsen, a professor of Psychology & Women's and Gender Studies. Working in her office has given me incredible opportunities, but none more impactful than the opportunity to TA her online Human Sexuality class this past summer. For this class I was able to help select content, grade assignments, and record sociocultural commentaries for the students to watch.
For each chapter of material, Dr Conradsen would record her lecture and then I would record a 10-15 minute video providing perspectives on privilege, consent, and other sociocultural factors.
This opportunity allowed me to engage my passion for teaching, learn in unique ways about other people's experiences and grow as a leader through holding people's stories well.
Through this experience I honed many skills most notably, research. In building the class as well as creating my commentaries I developed the ability to find both popular press articles as well as academic journal articles to supplement the textbook of the class. As Dr. Conradsen and I were looking through the textbook, we found that sexual privilege was glaringly absent from the text and so I began to collect other materials to round-out this important part of the class material.
Other skills I gained surrounded the logistics of running a class. I created a rubric for reflective assignments and I worked to logically order the material in the class.
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BIOGRAPHY
I am a student at Berry College, currently studying Psychology and Religion. Berry College has afforded me incredible work opportunities including: supervising Gate of Opportunity Scholars, working alongside the Human Resources Department, facilitating discussions on masculinity, privilege and sexuality in an academic setting.
A highlight of my work experience at Berry is the opportunity to be a Teacher's Assistant for Dr. Conradsen's Human Sexuality Online Course. This opportunity allowed me to lead students through material I am incredibly passionate about while at the same time being able to learn from them and help them to succeed. In a specific way, this class leveraged many of my passions including: gender roles, masculinity, feminism and an ethic of intersectional equality.