Julia Metzker believes in the power of a liberal arts education to transform individuals and heal communities.
She has experience in many aspects of building effective learning environments and assessing student growth. Julia is thrilled to be able to continue this work as the Director for the Washington Center. Prior to joining Evergreen and the Washington Center, she served as the founding Executive Director for the Brown Center for Faculty Innovation and Excellence at Stetson University.
Julia received her first degree from The Evergreen State College where she learned first-hand the value of a transformative liberal arts education. She obtained a doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry from the University of Arizona and completed a post-doctoral appointment at the University of York in York, UK. In her 10 years as a chemistry professor at Georgia College, she discovered the power of community-based learning to engage students and was selected to champion the institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan as the inaugural Director of Community-based Engaged Learning at Georgia College in 2016. During her journey of discovering herself as an educator, she was fortunate to find a cohort of like-minded university educators and they co-founded the Innovative Course-building Group (IC-bG) – a grass-roots social network for learning that supports teaching faculty and staff across disciplines. Their most recent endeavor, Course Design for Essential Learning, helps faculty build courses that use dilemmas, issues and questions (DIQs) to inspire students and facilitate transformative student learning. She is also particularly proud of her recent work with Imagining America’s Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship, a research group that is reimagining and reclaiming the democratic potential of assessment.
She holds many identities. She is a life-long learner. She is a faculty developer. She is cis-gender. She is a feminist. She is a scientist. She is a humanist. She is a knitter. She is a wife. She is a Gemini. She is addicted to podcasts. She is a citizen. She is an educator. She is a daughter. She is an occasional farmer.