E172: Melissa Beers, Part 3: General Education, Inclusion, Interdisciplinarity, and the Bookends

In this episode Garth interviews Melissa (Missy) Beers from the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH – for our first Part 3 episode on PsychSessions. Missy first recounts her career path, from graduate school to business and industry, then government, then research, then back to higher education. She teaches as an adjunct faculty member for a while and then steps into the Director of Introductory Psychology at Ohio State. With redevelopment of the general education curriculum in 2016, Missy was a key player on the Implementation Committee, foreshadowing the future.  Missy now directs the “bookend courses” in the gen ed curriculum, about 500 course sections serving about 10,000 students annually. And then there is the assessment conversation, universal design, pedagogy, and inclusion. The interdisciplinarity of the future is now.