My work is focused on blurring the lines between formal and informal educational spaces with prospective teachers and future community organizers. I’m a teacher first, then a researcher, so my work is grounded in my experiences as a public educator. More specifically, I’m driven by the idea that schools are community centers, and learning is most successful when school stakeholders support restorative relationships between classrooms, community members, and families.

I have been a teacher and course designer for nearly 15 years. From my early days as a public high school teacher to my experiences instructing undergraduates in the Education, Communities, and Organizations program and graduate students at IslandWood, I focus on transformative pedagogical designs that support reciprocal learning relationships between students and our communities. Then, as a researcher, I qualitatively analyze how students transform learning experiences with/for each other and how students (re)mediate purposes of learning with/for each other through reflective classroom activities.

I have supported analysis and writing projects on both Mobile City Science and Off the Map[p] as a research assistant. Also, I spent nearly five years as a research assistant in the Information School working on an NSF grant with teens at Pacific Science Center in Discovery Corps to develop a digital badge system related to workplace and science skill development. Previously, I instructed the technology seminar in the UW College of Education Secondary Teacher Education Program.

Before beginning my doctoral studies at UW, I was a public high school English teacher in central Illinois (2007-14), and I earned a master’s degree in Educational Leadership from the University of Illinois at Springfield (2013).