Carrie Lanza

Teaching Philosophy

My orientation to teaching is grounded in principles of critical pedagogy, collaboration, and a community-engaged, place-based praxis that seeks to democratize the role of the university in the local environment. To this end, a number of my courses are taught in conjunction with the UWB Community Based Learning and Research Center.

My courses primarily introduce and critically interrogate the “helping” professions, institutions, policies, and social research focusing especially on the complex interface between intention and actual outcomes in addressing a variety of social problems, such as poverty, mental illness, and child welfare, to name a few. A second subset of my teaching explores the roll of the arts- particularly music and dance- in personal healing, community building, social change work, policy-making and urban planning.

Several core principles of my teaching:

• Context Matters: encouraging students to consider how the environmental and historical contexts in which social issues and the systems that have emerged to address them have evolved over time.
• Self Reflection: teaching skills for iterative self-reflection as a praxis for students to identify their own intersectional positionalities in order to grapple with issues of systemic oppression, empowerment and cultural humility.
• Allyship and Advocacy: engaging students in developing strategies for allyship and advocacy regarding social issues that they care about outside of the classroom.
• Professionalization: encouraging students to simultaneously critically interrogate the helping professions while “trying on” different aspects of those professional identities.

I am striving to create a classroom environment ripe for a respectful, lively engagement with the subject matter at hand primarily via conversation as well as through lectures, visits from guest speakers, and small group work.

Courses Taught in IAS

BIS 226: Foundations of Social Services
BIS 312: Approaches to Social Research
BIS 445: Meanings and Realities of Inequalities
BISSEB 304: Institutions and Social Change
BISIA 484: Arts Learning in the Community: Community and Healing through Dance (with Diana Garcia Snyder, MFA)
BIS 490: Integrative Seminar - Place, Space, Social Inequality & Transformation

Courses Taught in Other Departments

BHS 302: Social Dimensions of Health, UW Bothell School of Nursing & Health Studies
BHTLH 199: Global Health and Film, UW Bothell School of Nursing & Health Studies
UW Study Abroad: Dance as Social Technology (with Diana Garcia Snyder, MFA)
SW 500: The Historical and Intellectual Foundations of Social Work, UW School of Social Work

Research/Scholarship

My work explores media and participatory arts-based methods in community-engaged practice. Entitled, “’Truth Plus Publicity’: Paul U. Kellogg and Hybrid Practice, 1902-1937”, my dissertation is a genealogical case study of place and media-based methods in community- engaged research during the early decades of the twentieth century as practiced during the social survey movement by social worker, researcher and journalist Paul U. Kellogg (1879-1958).  My work also explores contemporary participatory arts and media – particularly music and dance- as strategies for culturally responsive interventions, community building and social change work via scholarship and praxis. To date, this has taken place in participatory arts collectives, Seattle Fandango Project and Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities.

August, 2016: Dissertation- “Truth Plus Publicity”: Paul U. Kellogg and Hybrid Practice, 1902-1937.

October, 2014: Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting, Tampa, FL. Panel Presentation: “Place, Space, and Visual Culture in the Pittsburgh Survey, 1907-1908.” Panel: Place-based Community

July, 2014: Personal and Society Transformation through Social Work and the Arts Invited Symposium, University of Michigan School of Social Work, Ann Arbor, MI. Presentation: Toward an Embodied Community Arts Praxis for Social Work.

2011 Smolker, David and Caroline Lanza. Socially Conscious Design in the Information Age: The Practice of an Architecture for Humanity in The Paradox of Urban Space: Inequality and Transformation in Marginalized Communities edited by Sharon Sutton and Susan P. Kemp.