TEACHING
In the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Mariah teaches a variety of courses related to her research interests including Wellness Communication on Social Media and Digital Influencers.
Asa Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah, Mariah served as the instructor of record for many digital media and journalism courses including Digital Journalism, Introduction to News Writing, Magazine Writing, Media Writing, Visual Editing, and Writing for Strategic Communication. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Mariah served as a University Teaching Assistant Fellow where she earned the opportunity to design and implement her own course within the Department of Communication. The course, titled Constructing Journalism, was designed as an intermediate journalism writing and reporting course for undergraduate students interested in pursuing hard news and investigative journalism roles. The course focused on producing quality stories during an era of "fake news" and included refining student's reporting and writing skills along with teaching them how to request documents through processes offered by the Freedom of Information Act. Students were challenged to think critically about story topics, angles, sources, and secondary data while producing newsworthy pieces.
Mariah was also the Graduate Advisor for Student Media for the 2021-2022 academic year. As the inaugural Graduate Advisor for Student Media at the University of Utah, Mariah worked directly with students involved in the university's media organizations including The Daily Chronicle, KUTV Radio Station, and Wasatch Magazine. The role involved running training for undergraduate students in professionalism, branding, and social media content creation. She also met weekly with students to support content creation and decision-making regarding special issues, collaborations between Student Media organizations, and any other daily requests student journalists may have as they refine their skills through Student Media.
Mariah has also served as a teaching assistant at the University of Utah for courses such as Media Communication History, Social Media Journalism, and Making Brands Stick, an undergraduate course focused on branding principles. As a master's student at the University of Iowa, she was a teaching assistant for Multimedia Storytelling. An introductory course to all things multimedia, Multimedia Storytelling taught students skills in blogging, social media storytelling, data, visual, and audio storytelling, videography, and more. Software taught in the course included the WordPress blogging platform, Storify, Plot.ly, CoveritLive, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro, and hardware like H4N recorders, Canon DSLR cameras, and LAV mics. Students created portfolios and built multimedia stories to run alongside their texts written in Journalism Reporting and Writing, a co-requisite course.