Dr. Laura Zanotti, Professor and Graduate Director, Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts, teaches several courses within the Department of Anthropology, including Human Cultural Diversity and Theory in Sociocultural Anthropology. She also teaches courses that cover discipline-specific and interdisciplinary approaches to environmental and social justice. She works towards confronting and acknowledging her own privileges and biases through self-reflection and continuous learning. This includes participating in department, university, and national workshops to ensure she and her colleagues are inclusive and equity-minded.

Zanotti emphasizes creating an inclusive classroom that opposes the concept of superiority and privilege along with other Western ideologies. She encourages discussion about these topics throughout the university community and works with departmental programing to address student differences and the importance of diverse scholarship, worldviews, and practices. These efforts include organizing a departmental decolonizing and decanonizing hackathon and presenting at the Purdue Maximizing Student Potential conference. Zanotti also encourages inclusive syllabus efforts at Purdue, and has published this work in the Fall 2020 Butler Center Working Paper Series: Special Issue Higher Education and COVID-19.

Dr. Zanotti commits to constructing an inclusive environment in her classes and around campus. She prioritizes holistic and care-based approaches to teaching practices in order to cultivate mentorship networks and support systems for her students. For example, she has curated an inclusive syllabus project that details many of these supports in practice.

The following table maps Dr. Zanotti’s teaching excellence evidence to evaluation activities.