Exceptional Teachers, Influential Researchers

For International Political Economy Director and Distinguished Professor Emelie Peine, global concepts are at the core of her teaching, but she often approaches them from a localized lens. While her research focuses on global food production, Peine creates opportunities for her students to contribute to local farms, and in doing so, learn worldwide concepts in their own backyard. The students in one of her labs spend three hours a week working alongside community gardeners across Pierce County; for 12 years, she has connected students directly with the people who live and work in the spaces that interest them, introducing them to all aspects of food systems from community gardens to commercial-scale farms. 

Another of Peine’s courses asks students to consider the issues that face rural communities across the world. Her research on this front has most recently taken her to Romania, India, and Brazil, where she spent a funded year studying the role of home- distilled alcohol in rural economies. Peine collaborates with fellow scholars in all three countries, and they will share authorship of the articles and book chapters arising from the research.

“I really like writing and publishing with faculty from other institutions; it models for students that it’s never just about you,” Peine says. “You don’t accomplish anything by yourself without help from anybody else. And collaboration — doing things in community — makes everyone better.” 

What she learns from her global research and far-flung partnerships also comes home to inform her teaching. 

“One of my big priorities is that I can take the experiences that I have doing research and bring them back to students,” Peine says. Her studies on alcohol now feed into a class called Hooch, which she has co-taught with a professor from the natural sciences, “to show students how you can approach one topic from radically different academic and disciplinary perspectives.”

The class, she says, is always full.

“In preparing for the class, reading all his material, I’m finding so many things that are just eye-opening: different ways to look at nature, at life, at biology,” he says.

Associate Professor and Director of Physical Therapy Holly Roberts also has connections overseas that inform her teaching — and in 2016, students started to accompany her abroad. Her three-semester course, Global Health Perspectives in Physical Therapy, includes a service-learning component in which she takes students to Guatemala to provide physical therapy to individuals who need it.

“I spent 27 years as a physical therapist in the Army, and I just retired in June,” Roberts says, explaining how she lived overseas and has traveled to 48 countries, most of them more than once. “I got excited about global perspectives and global work through my own travel and felt that I wanted to share that perspective with students.” 

Some countries, Roberts says, don’t recognize physical therapy as a profession, so populations simply do not have access to rehabilitative services. Her goal in starting the program was to spark a fire in students that would “help them see themselves and their profession from a broader perspective.”

To bring her students abroad to work with populations in need, Roberts did extensive evidence-based research to consider the sustainability of such a project, ensuring that students didn’t simply work with a patient once and then never see them again. By partnering with a local organization in Guatemala called Hearts in Motion, Roberts considers their work to be collaborative with what locals are already doing, augmenting their program but never seeking to replace it. She sees the trip as an opportunity for students to gain confidence working with different populations and leaning into different leadership skills.

When she retires, Roberts says she dreams of helping to educate educators to build infrastructure for rehabilitation services across the world. As far as work being done closer to home, she says she is most proud of her students who are able to take the principles they learn abroad and apply them to underserved populations within the United States. “They learn about the social determinants of health and healthcare disparities, and then they turn around and apply these principles locally,” she says.

Roberts finds balance and help with her scholarship at the Faculty Development Center, which opened in 2021 and offers space and resources for Puget Sound professors. Through the center, Roberts has sat on panels talking about faculty-led international service learning; she has also shared thoughts on teaching with newer faculty as a more seasoned professor. Other offerings from the Faculty Development Center, she says, include discussions with award-winning teachers on secrets to success, structured mentorship, open office hours, and collective writing time, which Roberts herself has hosted. “It’s just a set time every week; anyone who wants to join can come and sit down and write,” Roberts says. “It offers some accountability for our scholarship. It encouraged me to go and write every week.”

Echoing the benefits of a collaborative space for faculty, Peine adds, “Writing can be really isolating and lonely, and it can be hard to keep yourself on task when you’re just rattling around in your office or your house by yourself. I think it’s amazing that they’re creating community around scholarship.”

As Puget Sound professors continue to balance their many hats and levels of impact, they seem to agree that their responsibility is still ultimately to their students; they want to stay fresh and open, equally ready to learn and grow, so they can foster people who go out into the world and make collective change.

A physical therapy colleague of Roberts’ did the math: “We graduate 36 students every spring,” she says. “If they work 50 weeks, five days a week, and see conservatively eight patients a day, that’s 72,000 individuals we can impact, just by sending out one cohort per year.” 

Adds Peine, “For my students, I think it’s important to make sure that they leave college with a concept of themselves as global citizens. I think it’s crucially important for liberal arts colleges to lean into that, and to push back against the narrative that higher education is only about job training. I really believe that the whole point of a liberal arts college is expand our students’ worldview beyond their personal experience.”