Hello

My Story

I am an educator, writer, and scholar traveling on the journey of social justice advocate. Over the last 20+ years this journey in education traversed mostly urban and a few rural contexts. I am white, cisgendered, and my pronouns are she/hers. I converted to Judaism in my 20s, though I grew up Catholic in a rural/suburban area outside St. Louis, Missouri and entered college as a first generation college-going student. I spent the last 20 years as an educator across the PK20 spectrum. My most recent work was as Director of Teaching and Learning at Parker School in Waimea, Hawaiʻi and Cohort Co-coordinator within the Master of Education in Teaching program at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. My passion for community-based research and social justice praxis is due to the students, families, and educators I worked alongside in Los Angeles’s South L.A. and Pico-Union areas in the first decade of my career as a high-school English and theatre teacher. I was also an administrator/teacher coach at an independent charter school in Pomona, CA. I LOVE coaching and mentoring teachers and supporting educators in improving/developing their critical consciousness and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Teaching and coaching writing is another passion. My research interests are teacher diversity, critical race studies in education, critical research methodology, multicultural teacher education, mentoring, and school climate. I have an M.F.A. in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.A. in Educational Leadership and Administration from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Teacher Education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Land Acknowledgement
I currently occupy the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary unceded lands of the Sac and Fox, Osage Nation, Ho-Chunk, Otoe-Missouria, Quapaw, Miami and many other tribes that have protected and sustained this land long before settlers came to occupy it. Their sovereignty over these lands was never ceded after unjust removal.

Please visit “Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement” by the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture https://usdac.us/nativeland and/or “A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment” by the Native Governance Center https://nativegov.org/resources to do your own research on tribal removal, tribal sovereignty, and the history of the land on which you reside.