This fall, Dr. Jelena Pokimica joined the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) department as a Clinical Assistant Professor. She holds a dual BA in International Relations & French from Kent State University, an MPA in Public Administration and a MA in Sociology from the University of Akron, and a Ph.D. in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership with a concentration in Human Resource Development (HRD) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In her PhD studies, her primary focus was on organization development, learning and performance, and strategic partnerships. Additionally, she has a keen interest in research.
Dr. Pokimica has extensive experience teaching in higher education covering courses in instructional design, business principles of HRD, organizational development, facilitation skills, diversity, leadership and policy, adult learning and development, and mixed and qualitative research methods. When reflecting on her teaching philosophy, Dr. Pokimica shared that “fostering curiosity, analysis and synthesis, reflection, and deeper-level thinking and abstracting characterize my teaching. I believe in teaching based on relationship-building, mutual respect, trust, integrity, and open and honest communication. I rely on these building blocks while teaching and advising students. I am also very proactive and available to respond promptly to student inquiries. Both conceptual and applied learning characterize my teaching.”
In addition to teaching, she was a very productive research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working on several grant-funded projects, such as PAGES – Progressing through the Ages: Global Change, Evaluation and Societal Well-Being, funded by a SEPA/NIH grant, in collaboration with the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois; an NSF STEM+C Project on Integrating Math and CS/CT in Elementary Grades, and a Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership 2015, leading the research section at Illinois Leadership Center at the time and collaborating with an outside partner – Survey Sciences Group. In addition, Dr. Pokimica contributed to remodeling of leadership competencies at Illinois Leadership Center though a collaborative data collection and analysis effort.
Dr. Pokimica enjoys presenting and participating at conferences, and she has also published her work – an endeavor which she is keen on continuing at Boise State University. Her dissertation focused on collaborating and learning in strategic international university partnerships at the research faculty and executive/administrator levels via an extensive collective case study design, and she plans on publishing out of this foundational research and building on it in the future. She also looks forward to establishing new partnerships with academia, industry (e.g., Micron), and various institutions.
She enjoys the beautiful, urban, and culturally rich Boise lifestyle and is busy exploring surrounding hills, mountains, canyons, as well as everything that the university has to offer! She equally enjoys her welcoming colleagues, fortifying connections, and meeting individuals from across the world here at Boise. She has lived in several European countries prior to moving to the States, having taken on a big- dream venture at a tender teenage age and amassing rich linguistic, multicultural, and global experiences on the way.
OPWL is excited to have Dr. Pokimica joining the department this August! For the fall 2022 semester, she will be teaching OPWL 537 instructional Design and OPWL 507 Interviews and Data Analysis.
Read the Boise State News version of this article.
About the OPWL Program
The Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) program helps prepare students for careers in the areas of instructional design, training and development, e-learning, workplace performance improvement, organizational development, program evaluation and performance consulting.
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