Staff Spotlight: Jessica Critten
Get to know our TIPS team!
Teaching Innovation and Program Strategy | TIPS Dec 8, 2024
The Staff Spotlight is a chance for the campus community to get to know more about our TIPS team members and what they do. Today we are featuring Senior Instructional Designer Jessica Critten.
How do you bring your previous professional experiences to bear on the work you do here with TIPS? I am currently a Senior Instructional Designer with TIPS, and I got into this line of work after about 10 years as an instruction librarian in higher education. Most recently I was the Pedagogy and Assessment Program Lead Librarian at Auraria Library, and before that I was an Associate Professor and Librarian at the University of West Georgia. I did a ton of teaching and design in both of these librarian roles and worked on a PhD in Critical Studies in Education at the University of Georgia for a time. I have almost 15 years of teaching experience, everything from courses and guest lectures on research and information literacy to first-year seminars to courses on film and cultural studies for Florida State University, where I got a Master’s in Interdisciplinary Humanities and a Master of Library and Information Science. I've taught in just about every kind of modality there is: in-person/location-based, online, hybrid/blended, synchronous, asynchronous. I'm still holding out for a correspondence course to get all my achievements!
My research has focused on the intersections of critical theory and education and although I’ve studied teaching and learning extensively, so much of the knowledge I bring to my role comes from my lived experience in the classroom and also my experience balancing the workload of being faculty. Because of this, I favor an ethic of care that includes student-centered, inclusive, strengths-based approaches and realistic, incremental strategies to improve the teaching and learning environment for both faculty and students.
What’s a project you’ve worked on recently that you are proud of or excited about? I feel very fortunate to have worked with faculty partners to develop the content for our campus Inclusive Pedagogy Academy (IPA). The course is focused on helping faculty grow in their practice and make immediate, actionable updates to their pedagogy, course materials, and policies. We recognize it is a bit of a time commitment, but those weeks are spaces for faculty to get feedback and ongoing support not just from our facilitators but also from fellow faculty. We make updates to the curriculum for each cohort to be responsive to faculty feedback, needs, and campus initiatives.
What do you find most meaningful about your current role? I really love working one-on-one with faculty to get to the heart of their questions about teaching and course design. Sometimes this is an involved, structured process where we discuss designing and aligning learning outcomes and assignments with intentionality and sometimes it is a 30-minute consultation where we focus on a single issue. I feel like this is a space where I get to see what animates faculty about teaching and I find it really inspiring!
Finally, tell us a little about yourself outside of work! I love jazz, Phillies baseball, collecting vinyl, train travel, English Premier League football, being near basically any body of water, audiobooks, documentaries, museums, and making lists.