Laura Overstreet
Senior Instructor
About
Laura Overstreet has been teaching courses for the department since 2004. These courses include family and society, gender and education, sociology of education, sociology of sexual behavior, marital and family interaction, and the sociology of intimate relationships, gender and society, and sociology of youth. She an M.A. and PhD in sociology at Texas Woman’s University and a B.A. in psychology at the University of North Texas. She also teaches general psychology, lifespan psychology, death and dying, and social psychology at Whatcom Community College. She published Gaining Perspective, a human development text, in 2007 and has worked on numerous family text supplements. She just completed development of lifespan psychology for Washington State’s Open Course Library. Her previous research interests include graduate student marriages and online extramarital relationships. Her current research interest is divorce in late adulthood and student learning and engagement. She appreciates the challenges facing non-traditional students, trained in the area of helping military students, Universal Design principles in online instruction, and is a certified Peer Reviewer for Quality Matters in online instruction. In addition to on-campus teaching, she has been teaching online since 1998. Laura incorporates service learning into her courses as much as possible. Students in her Sociology of Youth course have been instrumental in contributing various youth service agencies in Whatcom County. Her students also work in the Chore Program through Whatcom Volunteers and at the Rainbow Recovery Center, a community rehabilitation facility for adults with mental illness that is part of Whatcom Psychiatric Services. She serves on the advisory board for the Rainbow Recovery Center and on the eLearning advisory board, and Student Success and Achievement Committee at Whatcom Community College.
Research Interests
- Divorce in late adulthood, student learning