I am a district program specialist with experience in grade levels 3, and 6-12. Over the past few years, I have begun to specialize in child-instructional leadership. Almost serendipitously, the different spheres of my life began to coalesce around this niche in a way that has been both fruitful to me as a creative and an educator. In 2017 I began to bring my middle school students to actually lead full-on sessions within my courses at CSU Bakersfield. I designed these sessions around essential standards the children were required to learn, but I also aligned the experiences to the essential learning expectations of the university department. As a researcher, I dived deep into the learning environment to really understand how the children and the adults benefited from these experiences. Today, I am fortunate to share the research, pedagogy, and practical application of child-instructional leadership at local and major conferences such as the National CUE Conferences and ISTE.
I consider child-instructional leadership as a topic that intersects within the spheres of 21st Century learning and equity issues. As a K-12 educator, I have always intentionally worked at Title I schools, and within those schools, I intentionally work with students that are academically or socially struggling. Teaching is first and foremost a form of activism for me and I consider my work and lifestyle to be part of a larger social struggle that seeks to oppose the status quo for marginalized populations in education.
Awards
- 2020 Most Outstanding Graduate Student IRB Protocol
- 2016 CSU Fullerton College of Education Edwin Carr Fellow (link)
- 2016 Summa Cum Laude graduate in Master’s of Educational Technology
- 2015 CSU Fullerton College of Education Scholarship
Teaching Experience
- 3rd Grade
- 9th-12th grade, Social Studies (mild/moderate Special Education)
- 7th & 8th grade, Science and Social Studies
- 9th grade, Language Arts and Math (intervention specialist)
- 6th grade, self-contained
- 6th grade, Language Arts and Social Studies
Conference Presentations/Papers
Published Work