Please join us congratulating Dr. Sarah Gatson who received the College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Mentoring Award. This award recognizes faculty who demonstrate exceptional dedication and effectiveness in inclusive mentoring of undergraduate students outside of the classroom, including high impact learning experiences.
Dr. Sarah Gatson is an exceptional teacher who employs experiential learning. In all of her courses, Dr. Gatson is committed to creating simultaneous learning communities and communities of practice, to broadening access to undergraduate participation in rigorous research, and to integrating service-learning into course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs).
Between 2003-2011, Dr. Gatson served as a co-creator of an interdisciplinary research teaching model lab for the TAMU College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology. The lab’s Research-Intensive Community (RIC) model led to the creation of interdisciplinary and multilevel teams consisting of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The teams designed and developed new research methods, applied for grants, conducted research, and presented original published work at professional conferences and venues. This project, to which undergraduates were critical contributors, won national and interdisciplinary support, garnering nearly two million dollars from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute for Humanities (NIH).
Dr. Gatson continued to develop the RIC model as a consultant in the development of the Aggie Research Program. There she developed innovative instruction and course design to expand undergraduate access to research in both CUREs and co-curricular settings. Over $470,000.00 in competitive, university-wide internal grants further contributed to her efforts. As a TAMU Service Learning Faculty Fellow (2013-2014), she designed a new Writing Intensive section of the Sociology of Community course in which she incorporated service learning and community-embedded research. While writing has always been a central part of Dr. Gatson’s courses, her three substantive Writing-Intensive courses (Marriage Institution; Community; & Law) incorporate both independent and RIC-team research projects in which undergraduate students engage seriously in peer review and come to appreciate themselves as nascent scholars. Many of her students go on to participate in multi-year service-learning projects.
Dr. Gatson’s classrooms are all learning communities and collaborative laboratories in which she stresses how thinking rigorously about sociological concepts can illuminate and help ameliorate local community problems. Students are encouraged to make connections between what they are learning and their individual experiences. In nurturing critical thinking, Dr. Gatson helps students develop their own questions about the world and experience themselves as problem-solvers and agents of positive change.
In Fall 2024, Community and Sociology of Technology and Science students worked with community organizations on campus, in College Station, and in Burleson County on a variety of service-learning projects focused on soil sustainability and land access, diverting food waste from landfills, and circular economies more generally. This spring, students in Sociology of Nutrition and Sociology of Law will continue these connections and build on others. In all of this work, Dr. Gatson makes it possible for undergraduates both to understand how research is created and to put that knowledge into practice. Many of her students go on to participate in multi-year service-learning projects.
Dr. Gatson is a unique asset to TAMU. Her success in innovative pedagogy is evidenced not only by grants, publications, and student success (including graduate students trained in her methods deploying the high impact learning activities discussed above both at TAMU and at other institutions). Today, her ongoing collaborative ethnographic, community food-security research project, Everybody Eats, has become a popular site for undergraduate students to learn and engage first-hand in projects that benefit the community. In this and so many of her endeavors, Dr. Gatson makes palpable the concrete value of TAMU research and helps students realize their Aggie obligation to selfless service for the greater good.
Congratulations, Dr. Sarah Gatson for such a well-deserved recognition!