2012 Innovative Teaching Award Winner

Dr. Shantal Marshall, Stanford University; University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Marshall earned her BA in Psychology and Sociology at UCLA in 2004. She earned her PhD in Social Psychology at Stanford in 2011. She has been mentoring and tutoring since she was in high school, and has taught students ranging from first-graders to graduate students. Her research focuses on the way that social representations – the images and narratives that make up our “common sense” – shape people’s perceptions of race, racial identity, and racial inequality. As a graduate student at Stanford she served as a teaching assistant or instructor for over ten courses in various departments including Psychology, Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, and Organizational Behavior. In 2007 she won a teaching award for her work as a teaching assistant in the Psychology Department. As a first-generation college student she helped other first-generation college students by teaching her own low-cost GRE preparation course every summer from 2005 to 2010. In 2010 she was selected as a Teaching Fellow for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, through which she created and taught “The Psychology of Race and Gender in Popular Culture.” Her favorite courses to teach focus on issues of race and gender in which students can analyze their own life experiences through a psychological lens. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA.