Leadership
Academe is a microcosm of civil society in which diverse peoples, languages, and ways of thinking are valued and shared in collective efforts to address the pressing social concerns of our time. My leadership philosophy stems from an abiding belief in the importance of the arts and humanities for civic sustainability in a diverse and democratic society. Civic sustainability is achieved through a process in which people from diverse backgrounds engage with each other to achieve a common goal. Civic sustainability is a method used to frame everyday interactions in the highest regard for each other’s dignity, habits of mind, ways of being, and means of expression. This practice helps to create a culture of inclusion in institutions, organizations, and communities. This practice also contributes to knowledge making that is relevant and useful to audiences within disciplines and in communities. I enact this leadership philosophy within communities and universities.
Teaching Diverse Learners
I routinely develop and lead numerous workshops for instructors across disciplines to help build their capacities for teaching disciplinary content to diverse learners in inclusive classrooms. These workshops include slide shows, lesson plans and activities, assignments and assessments. I have also helped programs develop mentoring programs for their instructors.
curricular projects
I lead teams of professors, instructors, graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in projects designed to reform curriculum. These projects, often grant supported, result in publications for members of the team and create a successful avenue for teacher mentorship and curricular innovations.
Faculty affairs
In my current capacity as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity, and Inclusion, I collaborate with the Dean in general planning, development, and management of faculty affairs in the College, and lead the implementation of the College’s Strategic Plan on Diversity and Inclusion . I have helped to lead strategic planning at two universities at the department, college, and university levels. During these processes, I coordinated focus groups, wrote reports of initial findings, identified strategic areas of innovation and challenge, and helped to write and present the final strategic plans. I have created initiatives and programming dedicated to the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty, the creation of a culture of inclusion in universities, the facilitation of transparent and consistent search and merit review procedures, and the support of faculty who take up experiential approaches in their scholarship, teaching, and service in the humanities.
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Indigenous Nations & Communities
Indigenous Nations & Communities
For the last five years, I've worked with a team of scholars, librarians, and indigenous language translators in the development of an online indigenous language manuscript translation space. This work has been supported through the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, Sparks Ignition grant and is featured in my research related to the creation of indigenous archives.
Native American Film Institute
22 American Indian youths and teens from several tribes around Michigan, Canada, and Illinois created digital videos in a NAFI film workshop that took place over several summers when I worked at Michigan State University. They're thinking about topics important to them, from domestic violence, fishing rights, and mass media's portrayal of women while learning the basics of digital video editing.
Check out "Violence Against Native American Women" by Destiny Soney.
curricular projects in native communities
Working with twenty-three representative language speakers, teachers, storytellers, medicine people, and leaders from the Cherokee Nation between 2010-2012, our team was tasked to produce a scalable, standardized curriculum that represents Cherokee lifeways. In January of 2011, we produced an eighty-page curricular framework for the Learn and Serve program for grades 4-12 in the fourteen county jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation. Between 2011-12, a smaller team finalized the Four Worlds curriculum for the Johnson O'Malley Co-Partner Program for grades 6-12.
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Teaching
All of my teaching is geared toward helping learners strive toward their educational goals, to learn to express and represent themselves, and to make a difference where it matters most to them. Across all courses that I teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels, my main goal is to engage all of my students in learning through experiential, multimodal, activity-based pedagogies in a comfortably rigorous environment. I support students’ development as thinkers, writers, and composers through state-of-the-art curricula, a respectful, inclusive and challenging classroom climate, and an engaged and engaging pedagogy. I've taught youths as young as 5 and adults as old as 82 in community organizations, after-school projects, and summer programs with my tribe.
Selected Graduate Classes
Seminar in Language, Literacies, and Power Introduces interdisciplinary perspectives on issues, questions, and trends in literacy studies. Emphasizes literacy research taking place in communities, classrooms, and tribes, the class explores the mutually sustaining relationships between literacies, power, culture, and the expressive tools people use.
Writing Research Surveys the research, writing, and thinking that's shaped the field of Composition and Rhetoric over the last 25 years.
Disciplinary Knowledge Formation Explores the nature of disciplinary knowledge (e.g. how it comes to be made, contested, extended, and valued).
Qualitative Methods of Research Overviews qualitative inquiry methodologies and methods, with a special emphasis on the development of a professional identity.
Selected Undergraduate Classes
Reading Theory
Visual Writing: Writing Visuals
Writing and Community Engagement
Writing Science and Technology
Selected Graduate Classes
Seminar in Language, Literacies, and Power Introduces interdisciplinary perspectives on issues, questions, and trends in literacy studies. Emphasizes literacy research taking place in communities, classrooms, and tribes, the class explores the mutually sustaining relationships between literacies, power, culture, and the expressive tools people use.
Writing Research Surveys the research, writing, and thinking that's shaped the field of Composition and Rhetoric over the last 25 years.
Disciplinary Knowledge Formation Explores the nature of disciplinary knowledge (e.g. how it comes to be made, contested, extended, and valued).
Qualitative Methods of Research Overviews qualitative inquiry methodologies and methods, with a special emphasis on the development of a professional identity.
Selected Undergraduate Classes
Reading Theory
Visual Writing: Writing Visuals
Writing and Community Engagement
Writing Science and Technology
