UW-Stevens Point
Co-Director, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars
Professor, History | Coordinator, International Studies and Peace Studies
Valerie Barske is a Professor of History and Coordinator of International Studies and Peace Studies with teaching and service commitments in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. Barske received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures with disciplinary emphases in History and Anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2009. Her ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on female activists in Okinawa, Japan has been funded by a Fulbright IIE Fellowship, a Blakemore Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship. Barske also received a UW System Fellowship with the Institute for Research in the Humanities. As a scholarly teacher, Barske combines anthropological theories of embodiment with feminist pedagogical practices into her own “signature pedagogy” for teaching History and International Studies. Barske employs embodied learning as an inclusive strength-based approach that helps students to co-construct “brave spaces” for taking new actions, to think with and through movement, and to explore epistemologies that valorize affect, agency, and intersectional subjectivities.
I am beyond thrilled to join the OPID Advisory Council as the incoming Co-Director of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program. I have participated in the program as both a Fellow and a Scholar. My SoTL research projects include investigations of embodied learning for teaching gender in the History classroom and growth mindset interventions for teaching general education courses in Global Awareness. At the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, I served as the first Faculty Fellow with the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning. I developed, organized, and facilitated a Faculty Learning Community with members across all five academic colleges on our campus focusing on the theme of retention in the classroom. I am excited to begin this new journey with OPID and the WTFS Program.