About Us

Please contact Riley if you need pedagogical support for curricular initiatives at the individual, departmental, and institutional level including consultations on assignment, course, and curriculum design, “Reimagining the Commons” Mellon proposals, and assessment of student learning at all curricular levels.  Please see the consultations page for more specifics about the ways that Riley can work with you to support teaching at Amherst College.  Riley is the point person for inquiries about the operations and functions of the Center.

She has taught since her graduate days in Santa Barbara teaching introductory and advanced theatre and gender studies courses as well as first and second-year experience courses.  Ask about her "Performance of Identity in the Classroom" course!  It has been, so far, the best teaching experience of her career.

She has a background in performance studies and completed her doctorate at UC Santa Barbara in Theatre Studies with a Feminist Studies doctoral emphasis .  She continues that scholarship, most recently serving as the research advisor for productions of the World War II "Blueprint Specials" produced on the aircraft carrier Intrepid with Waterwell Theatre January 6th - 11th, 2017.

Riley's current SOTL research projects focus on implicit bias in course evaluations, students as pedagogical partners, and teaching and learning at small liberal arts colleges. Recent pedagogical publications:

Caldwell-O'Keefe, R. & Recla, M. (2020). “Slowly changing the world”: Embedding experiential learning to enhance ethics and diversity. In Sengupta, E., Blessinger, P. and Makhanya, M. (Eds.), Integrating community service into curriculum: International perspectives on humanizing education (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 25) (147-164). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Caldwell-O'Keefe, J. R., Boyd, D.E., Ashe, D., Bach, D., & Diede, M. (May 2020).Turning off the firehose and fostering community for the new professoriate: Five institutional perspectives on new faculty orientation." The Journal of Faculty Development. 34 (2), 59 - 68.

Click here for her Curriculum Vitae.

Sarah Bunnell is the Associate Director and STEM Specialist for the Center for Teaching and Learning. She is currently serving as President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Prior to joining Amherst, she was an Associate Professor of Psychology and Great Lakes Colleges Association Teagle Pedagogy Fellow at Ohio Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental and Cognitive Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from the University of Kansas.

Please contact Sarah if you would like to discuss assignment, course, or departmental curricular design, assessment of student learning, or other areas of teaching and learning in the Sciences. She welcomes all scope of conversations, ranging from how to redesign a single class activity to rethinking the structure of departmental curriculum. She is also available to support faculty and staff in scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) research projects.

Sarah’s SOTL research interests include inclusive teaching practices in STEM, the role of empathy in learning, and best practices in faculty development broadly defined. Recent pedagogical publications:

Bunnell, S.L. (2021). A Whole Person Model of Student Success Advising in the Liberal Arts. In M. Kek & H. Huijser (Eds.), Student Support Services: Exploring impact on student engagement, experience and learning. Springer Nature. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-3364-4_14-1

Bunnell, S.L., Lyster, M.B., Greenland, K.B., Mayer, G., Gardner, K., Leise, R., Kristensen, T., Ryan, E., Ampiah-Bonney, & Jaswal, S.S. (2021). From Protest to Progress through Partnership with Students: Being Human in STEM (HSTEM). International Journal for Students as Partners, 5(1), 26-46. doi: https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v5i1.4243

Anderson, L.J., Dosch, J.J., Lindquist, E.S., McCay, T.S., Machado, J.-L., Kuers, K., Gartner, T.B., Shea, K., Mankiewicz, C., Rodgers, V.L., Saunders, P.A., Urban, R., Kilgore, J.S., Powell, A., Ramage, B., Steinweg, M., Straub, J., Bunnell, S.L., & Witkovsky-Eldred, M. (2020). Assessment of student learning in undergraduate courses with collaborative projects from the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN). Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, 4(1), 15- 29. doi: 10.18833/spur/4/1/2

Her CV is located here.