Graduate Student, Teacher Education
College of Education
About
I am a student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Ph.D. program within the College of Education's Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. My research interests are centered around the processes and paradigms of public schooling. I am endlessly defining and redefining my interests in education, but most can be categorized into these areas:
1.) The histories and theories of curriculum thought in the United States and the nature and genealogy of secondary school subject areas
2.) How teachers learn to teach; their motivations for becoming teachers; how teachers act as curriculum makers; past & present reform movements in teacher education programs
3.) Theories of pedagogy, media literacy, teaching for social justice, and their implications for meaningful learning within secondary education
4.) Social studies education reform and rethinking how social studies curricula are manifested in schools including the introduction of philosophy, critical geography, cultural studies, anthropology, and interdisciplinary approaches into social studies curriculum
5.) Social and political conflicts in curriculum development; issues of curriculum policy that affect the power-knowledge relationship between teachers and schools and curriculum as institutionalized ideologies
Prior to commencing graduate studies, I held an array of teaching positions in schools situated within differing social and cultural contexts after graduating from the Community of Teachers program at Indiana University: from a small, rural school in the Scottish Highlands to an ethnically diverse comprehensive high school in a suburban college town in southern Indiana, and, most recently, an urban high school in central Phoenix ranked as "excelling" by the State of Arizona and US News & World Report.
Other teaching experiences have been outside of the confines of a comprehensive public high school: a seminar for undergraduates living in a residential college (the Ralph L. Collins Living-Learning Center); a writing and drama program for incarcerated adults in a correctional facility; facilitating a teen support group; and teaching sessions in a summer enrichment camp for first-generation college-bound seniors.
Professional activity:
AERA:
Division B: Curriculum Studies
Division F: History and Historiography
Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education
Association of Teacher Educators
American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies
History of Education Society
Organization of Educational Historians
Society for the Study of Curriculum History
American Educational Studies Association
National Association for Multicultural Education
Contact Information
Department of Teacher Education
313 Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
