Fifteen graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been honored with 2019 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards, including Melody Waring, a PhD student in the Social Welfare program at the School of Social Work.
Waring’s dissertation looks at the intersection of caregiving and employment, and the public policy implications that arise. She has taught courses on the social work field, statistics for social work, and Social Work with Ethnic and Racial Groups, and in spring 2020 is teaching a course on Research Methods for Social Work. She enjoys seeing students take an abstract concept through to its real-life application. She says she also learns from these moments, as students’ experiences and perspectives make concepts she has worked with for years become deeper and more complex.
“Since my teaching is in the School of Social Work, I believe the work of writing – of taking the unspoken and making it clear – prepares students to go into the field as advocates for social change,” Melody says. “I feel poignantly the honor and responsibility of helping to shape a generation of social workers who will take up the fight for a better society. And the joy of being part of that keeps me going!”
Read the full article.