The Wellesley College website is currently in transition. This temporary site is for current Wellesley College community members. If you're a prospective student or employee, please go to our new site at www.wellesley.edu.

Linda Charmaraman

Curriculum Vitae

lcharmar@wellesley.edu
Wellesley Centers for Women
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

WCW Profile

Linda Charmaraman

Senior Research Scientist; Visiting Lecturer in Education

Research interests include risky and resilient digital media behaviors within vulnerable peer and family contexts as well as digital citizenship and how to engage youth in (re)defining and monitoring healthy digital media use.

I finish the semester even more enthusiastic about the program than I was when I signed on. In large part this is driven by the students’ enthusiasm and commitment to the course — their growth as writers, excitement for the challenge, and enthusiasm about public writing have made me only more so. – Jay Turner, Professor of Environmental Studies

[T]he students were able to speak and write confidently about the material, to “own it,” to conceive of themselves as authorities, and to feel the relevance and urgency of questions of race, gender, sexuality, inequality, technology, and so forth. I’ve seldom had a group of students more thoroughly engaged and invested in a course. – Paul Fisher, Professor of American Studies

... I was excited about how the course offered students many different ways to “shine” (particularly in comparison to the standard p-set/test mathematics course): some students excelled at the mathematics, some at the writing, and some at giving feedback. …[T}he public writing aspect of the course... supported the progress students made in learning independently. As one student said in her reflection, “I discovered over these thirteen weeks of writing and reading and editing that I spent much of this time learning how to communicate mathematics to myself,” which of course is the first step towards explaining ideas to others. – Karen Lange, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Writing for a public audience significantly sharpened students’ ability to apply in new settings what they had learned in other Economics courses. Frequent writing and editing significantly bolstered students’ writing skills. In addition, students really liked the wide range of big-picture Economic topics we covered, and commented on how much they liked learning to think about writing as a tool of communication rather than as a means to show a professor how much they knew about a topic. The transformation over the semester from the first to last assignment was dramatic. – Dan Sichel, Professor of Economics

Because Philosophy is not a highly structured major, there wasn’t much in terms of common content that I could expect the students to share... Consequently, the range of topics was very broad… I think the breadth of the topics actually enhanced the [Calderwood] workshop experience: because the students were not experts on each other’s topics, they made excellent surrogates for a typical public readership.
– Erich Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy

During the peculiar semester which was Spring 2020, I was gratified and relieved that my students and I were able to make the shift… to our zoom screens. I had worried that we would not be able to maintain the same kinds of conversations and connections that we had. But I need not have worried; if anything, my students grew to be sharper editors, more insightful readers, and more informed participants once we were zooming together… Their care and concern for one another came right through their screens. The course became a lifeline for all of us. – Heather Bryant, Lecturer in the Writing Program