Instructional Design – Domenic DeSocio, Ph.D.

As an instructional designer, my areas of expertise include:

Here’s a snapshot of my recent work in instructional design:

At Northwestern, I created a new first-year College Seminar entitled “Life and Love on the Dancefloor: Berlin Dance Music and Club Culture, 1990-2020,” which I teach annually for new students as either a college writing seminar or as a seminar meant to introduce students to university life and culture. A special highlight in this class has been inviting prominent DJs, music producers, and originators of house and techno music to the classroom to speak to students about the history and art of making dance music and to introduce them to the practices of DJing.
In Spring 2024, a colleague and I introduced the first course at Northwestern on the topic of queer Central Europe, in which we co-teach the emergence and development of queer cultures and politics in the German-speaking and Slavic lands between 1850 and 1950.
In my seminar “The German Invention of Sexuality” at Vassar College, I participated in the Student Teacher Engaged Pedagogical Partnership (STEPP), a pedagogical partnership program at Vassar College that centers intentional dialogue about teaching practices in a semester-long faculty-student collaboration. It focuses on building student-faculty relationships and empowering student voices while offering faculty an opportunity to receive constructive feedback and work collaboratively with a student partner to address teaching goals.

For Spring 2022, I was awarded the Frances D. Fergusson Faculty Technology Exploration Fund to experiment with virtual reality and its benefits for language instruction. My students used this new technology to conduct original research on 1920s queer Berlin and created a virtual map and guided audio tour through Berlin for the broader public at Vassar.

I founded and received college funding for a pedagogical working group among junior language faculty at Vassar. Working with colleagues across several different language programs ranging from Ancient Greek and Italian to Korean, we aim to foster collaboration between language programs; swap materials and expertise; and craft initiatives with students to promote foreign language learning in higher education.

As a Graduate Student Instructor Consultant (GSIC) focusing in instructional design at UM, I offered one-on-one consultations with instructors on all aspects of the teaching and learning process, including: course design, instructional technology, active learning, assessments and evaluations, classroom climate, and inclusive teaching, and others. Additionally, I conducted classroom observations and midterm student feedback evaluations to craft in-depth narrative reports that combine qualitative and quantitative data to inform an instructor about their pedagogical strengths and areas of improvement.

I also served as an Instructional Technology GSIC at UM, consulting with instructors and running workshops about how to best incorporate and use digital media, instructional technologies, and online learning tools.

In the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at UM, I served on the Curriculum Committee, where I collaborated with faculty and administration to assess, design, and implement departmental our curricular policies, course offerings, programs, and student success. Specifically, I helped spearhead the department’s turn toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, organizing and facilitating workshops on anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive teaching.

In 2019, I earned my university’s Graduate Teaching Certificate, a four-year-long professional development program that, through several workshops and a semester-long seminar, trained in me the best practices of and latest innovations in collegiate-level teaching.