In his Politics of Developing Nations summer course (Pol_S 400), Richard Elgar begins each class with a pop music song whose lyrics apply to the lesson’s subject matter. “The Clash appears quite a lot, like ‘Rock the Casbah’ when we look at the Middle East,” said Elgar. “Also songs like ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries when […]
Nominated by his students, Karl Krotke-Crandall, a WSU Global Campus lecturer in the Department of History, has been honored with the 2021-22 WSU Excellence in Online Teaching Award. “The flexibility of online learning opens the doors of life-changing higher education to a wide variety of people, diversifying our classrooms in
Three recently hired Arts & Sciences faculty were awarded seed grant funding to develop unique research and creative projects in anthropology, history, and music.
Bala Krishnamoorthy, professor of mathematics and statistics at WSU Vancouver, has been named the first recipient of the Yang “Wendy” Liu Award for Excellence in Teaching International Students. In nominating Krishnamoorthy for the award, PhD student James Asare noted, “In all three of Bala’s classes I took, what struck me the most was his careful […]
Birds of a feather not only flock together but also appear to settle down together. “The presence of another bird that isn’t migratory seems to be a really potent cue to stop migration,” said Heather Watts, a Washington State University behavioral ecologist and corresponding author on a study recently published in Biology Letters. “We saw […]
Throughout the pandemic, the WSU Jazz Big Band stayed focused on their craft, leveraging Zoom and other technologies to practice, perform, and record music together while physically distanced. This spring, DownBeat magazine awarded the band its 2022 Graduate College Large Jazz Ensemble Award, recognizing the quality of the band’s asynchronous
Three years ago, Marilou Cassidy, then 78 years old, decided to give herself an 80th birthday present: a college degree. She had earned numerous college credits over the years and WSU Vancouver was just 15 minutes away from her home. Even so, “It took me three or four months and a lot of nerve to […]
The Community and Equity Certificate Program is helping faculty and staff across the WSU system expand their understanding of equity-mindedness and build a toolkit for engaging more effectively with students, colleagues, and community partners. Kara Whitman, assistant professor in the School of the Environment, likened the workshop breakout discussions to a faculty learning community where
Never underestimate the power of an elective, advises Matt Ellison (’92 business) and GurglePot founder. “It gets people out of their comfort zone,” he says. “That’s the beauty of going to college and broadening your knowledge. At some point in life that random class could become the most important one you ever took.” For him, […]
Scattered across southern Ethiopia are thousands of mysterious stone monoliths rising as high as 20 feet. “We don’t know who built the stelae in southern Ethiopia or why,” says Addisalem Melesse, a WSU doctoral student in archaeology. “However, the research we are doing at WSU is starting to shed light on the monument’s history and […]