Faculty profile – Kate Boyd
- 11/20/2025
- Category: Featured Faculty Spotlights Awards & Recognitions
Kate Boyd (PhD) has been awarded a fellowship with the , to participate in their K-12 educator cohort over the course of 9 months. This fellowship is sponsored by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and made possible with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
In September, she participated in a kickoff session with an interdisciplinary cohort of teachers and librarians. This follows her previous fellowship with American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (June 2024 ) that focused on public health approaches to media literacy and preventing youth online radicalization. In particular, Kate studied the relationship between harmful online activities and student behavior in schools, and has been focusing on developing strategies that strengthen healthy and inclusive school culture.
The Center for an Informed Public's Community Fellowship, Educator Track, is designed to support educators in developing and implementing media and information literacy initiatives within their communities and institutions. Fellows participate in professional development activities, collaborate with peers, and work to create sustainable programs that help students build resilience to false and misleading information and learn how to navigate our complex information environment.
In upcoming months, Kate will work with researchers and fellow educators to design age-appropriate programming at the cutting edge of media and information literacy, and will bring that programming back to our students and faculty. She will continue to work with the group in regular meetings throughout the rest of the year, and hopefully, she says, beyond.
I am excited to continue to work my NWS colleagues to create curricula that invites students to intentionally consider how they engage with these digital information ecosystems, including how they will become users and creators of social media in ways that reflect NWS values.
Kate is excited about developing her media literacy teaching skills as well as deepening her commitment to teaching students how to identify misinformation and disinformation campaigns, specifically through a social justice lens. “I am especially motivated to support students to lead these conversations with their peers in the classroom, in affinity and learning spaces, and for the larger community,” she says. Kate’s 12th grade students have opportunity to do so in the courses she teaches with Harumi LaDuke, including in Civics and in their Prison Studies and Media Studies cross-class Counternarratives collaboration that will be installed throughout the school at the end of Trimester 2 and 3.
Kate has also worked extensively with students in WARLS (White Antiracist Learning Space) to support student-led and student-centered media literacy skills focused Day of Justice workshops, and is excited to be collaborating with Catalina Martinez, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, to integrate these skills into the gender equity programming this year.
On a personal level, Kate is also looking forward to continued professional growth in this area: “As a Humanities teacher and scholar, I love how this fellowship is truly an interdisciplinary research and teaching opportunity, and it allows me to learn from UW faculty in the Sciences, as well as from an incredible cohort of K-12 educators. Kate hopes to collaborate with NWS faculty in different disciplines, and is working with Science Department Chair Flora Athappilly and Math Department Chair Jacob Tafejian to integrate one of the Center for an Informed Public’s escape room games into STEM-tacular this year to offer a fun and experiential approach to media literacy skills development, particularly relevant to a STEM learning environment.
