I grew up in New Brunswick, Canada, ended up in Chicago for university, got married and stayed in Chicago. My first teaching jobs were teaching adult ESL and citizenship classes at World Relief-Chicago and the Albany Park Community Center. I completed an M.A. at DePaul University in Chicago (Social & Cultural Foundations of Education) and started my K-12 teaching career in 2006 as a high school history teacher at Uplift Community High School, a CPS school in the Uptown neighborhood.
In 2011, together with my family, I move from Chicago to a town in southern Ethiopia called Wolaita Soddo where we worked as volunteer managers of a children’s home for one year. I then took a middle school Social Studies and English Language Arts teaching position at the International Community School (ICS) of Addis Ababa. I taught at ICS for nine years, both middle school and high school, including the IBDP courses of World History, Business Management, and Theory of Knowledge.
In 2021 we moved to Kigali, Rwanda. I took the opportunity of that move to return to school. Since then I’ve been pursuing a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Virginia. I also joined the International School of Kigali (ISK) in January, 2022 as a high school Social Studies teacher, teaching Economics, AP Human Geography, AP Psychology, AP Comparative Government & Politics, and Statistics.
During the 2025-26 school-year, I’ll be stepping aside from full-time teaching to focus on completing my final Ed.D. capstone research with the goal of completing the program in the summer of 2026. My capstone research is focused on better understanding the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of Social Studies and Humanities teachers, including how teachers can improve their professionally craft — develop their PCK — through supported professional-learning cycles of Plan, Teach, and Reflect.
During my teaching career, as well as in my studies in education, my interests have been in curricular unit planning, problem-based learning, and authentic, project-based assessment. I’ve always taken a particular interest in experiential learning, including learning that involves community engagement and service-learning. Much of my research during my Ed.D. program has focused on service-learning and global citizenship education.
I’ve also grown passionate about teacher professional-learning. I feel strongly that teaching is a professional career that entails professional knowledge and skills and requires on-going learning. I believe that teaching is ultimately a craft that one refines through the practice of reflective teaching— Praxis. I find Lee Shulman’s notion of Pedagogical Content Knowledge a compelling framework for teacher professional learning. Shulman presented PCK as the ability of teachers to transform their own subject matter knowledge into steps, models, metaphors and examples to guide students to understand that subject matter; for Shulman, this is what sets teachers apart as professionals.