- Campus:
- IU
What professional development activity will/did you complete with the help of the IUWIT grant?
I attended the 2024 Leaders Institute: Leading During Challenging Times in Indianapolis.
How was that activity important/beneficial to your professional development?
As an educator for more than 20 years, I believe in continued learning through professional development. It’s easy to get comfortable in one’s professional role. To continue to grow and nurture my own development, I am drawn to opportunities to strengthen my leadership and the intentionality by which I approach my engagement work. There is an abundance of professional learning opportunities at IU to choose from, and in my current role, I have been able to design and develop an infrastructure for learning opportunities, events and resources with IU staff and faculty that aim to enhance IU’s collective capacity for mutually beneficial P-12 engagement. Ongoing professional development helps me build more expertise and confidence within my work.
What was the most valuable take-away from your experience with that activity that you can share with us?
Learning about Lee Anne Bell’s work on storytelling for social justice (organizingengagement.org) and the differences among stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories and emerging/transforming stories. How to recognize and confront these stock stories while recognizing and amplifying concealed, resistance, and emerging/transforming stories.
What did you want to be as a child, and how has that journey led you to where you are today?
My story is anything but linear. I wanted to be a hairdresser as a child. But once I got to high school and college, I began searching for a profession that could have a larger positive impact on communities. I first got a bachelor’s degree here at IU Bloomington in Human Development and Family Studies before moving to Chicago. I didn’t find work I was interested in that was associated with that degree, so I became an industrial construction worker in the union trades, something I had done in the summers in between college. Five years later, I went on to get an M.Ed. and licensure in teaching to become a career-change elementary teacher and later began a Ph.D. in Language Literacy and Culture while teaching in Chicago Public Schools. After I left the classroom, I went on to work in several higher education projects where I grew and nurtured partnerships with public school partners, supporting teachers and principals. I returned to Chicago Public Schools for a brief time as an administrator before continuing my work in higher education. After my dissertation defense entitled Discernments of Trust and Vulnerability Points During a Whole School Literacy Improvement Process in 2020, I worked for the Digital Education Hub, and the Collaborative for Equitable and Inclusive STEM Learning (CEISL) in the IUI school of education for three years. In that role I designed and facilitated teacher professional development to support teachers in our partner schools. I also had the extraordinary opportunity to work on an AI project that aimed to build an instructional tool for teachers, which was fascinating. I have been in my current role in the IU Office of School Partnerships for just over a year, and I teach Language Arts Methods to preservice teachers in the Bloomington School of Education.
What are some of your hobbies outside of work?
I enjoy spending time with my family and friends, hiking in the Lake Griffy woods, kayaking, attending IU basketball games, playing guitar and singing, and competing with my family during Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Never having been a football fan, my most recent recreational activity has become IU football, thanks to Coach Cignetti.