EdD, University of Rochester, Margaret Warner School of Education
MSW, University of Cincinnati
Interests
Social justice-focused teacher education, particularly in the areas of literature and history. This interest infuses all of my teaching in educational philosophies, politics, including democracy and education, women and education, and curriculum theory, where students find that my courses bridge teacher education and foundations of education because of their social reconstructionist content. I am always asking, "What should school curriculum look like if the goal of education is to reconstruct our socially and economically inequitable world?"
I facilitate the undergraduate, ninth term and MAT programs in English and Social Studies. I am proud of our teacher education programs in that they combine the best of practical "how to" knowledge with a rigorous inquiry-oriented foundational education covering the politics of public education as well as the best of materialist, feminist, and cultural studies-driven history and literature curriculum. We do not marginalize the spiritual realm of human experience. We privilege a combined focus on close study of text and practices of making the texts under consideration "come alive."
As a teacher educator I am guided by imagined conceptions of a "wholeness of labor," and "social action as curriculum," but also a very practical sense of "leaking" our deepest values in the pattern that frames our lessons, and our understanding that every lesson must include an active component where students use their literacy skills in sophisticated and clearly targeted ways. In the past few years, though, I have come to conceive of the all curriculum as haunted by the ghosts of people and ideas that have been rubbed out as part of the process of justifying an economic system that perpetuates our non-sustainability crisis. To make us all aware of the hauntings must be the beginning of an education that awakens us to possibilities.
Publications
New, The Chessmaster's Daughter, Cayuga Lake Books, February 2022.
"Corporate Educational Reform Assessed from Inside Teacher Education"
Parallel Practices: Social Justice-Focused Teacher Education and the Elementary School Classroom. NY: Peter Lang, 2002.
