Teaching
Award-Winning Teaching in Communication, Gender, & Culture
Jenn is an award-winning teacher who builds community with students through embodied learning, dialogue-based communication, creativity, empathy, and self-reflexivity. She invites students into deeper levels of critical thinking through honest conversations and engagement with complexity.
Topics Taught:
Gender and communication
Women’s, gender, and sexuality studies
Interpersonal communication
Intercultural communication
Interdisciplinary social science research
Race, class, and gender
Public speaking
Foundations of communication
“Jenn’s pedagogy is generous, kind, and critically focused. Generous in the sense that she seems genuinely interested in students’ learning, working with them to develop a community that serves good public communication. Kind in the sense that she responds to them with care, calls them by name and acknowledges their contributions to the content of her lesson. Critically focused in that she pushes them to consider the implications of their communication—from public speaking to everyday talk, I think her teaching, as evidenced in my observation, keeps the importance of our discipline on the front burner.”
Academic Qualifications & Honors
Ph.D. in Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University, May 2013
M.A. in Communication Studies, University of Northern Iowa, July 2006
B.A. in Interpersonal Communication, University of Northern Iowa, May 2004
Sam Wallace Outstanding Lecturer Award, Department of Communication, University of Dayton, 2023
Thomas J. Pace Teaching Award, Department of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University, 2010
“When Jenn speaks, you listen, analyze, and relate to what she is saying. She is vulnerable, accepting and kind. She is everything you could hope for in a professor.”