David Baksh is a Ph.D. student in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to this, he earned an M.A. in Teaching of English also at Teachers College, and a B.A. in Secondary English Education at The City College of New York. David has served in various educational roles, including teaching high school English and supervising student teachers of English in New York City. He has shared his work at venues including the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, Teachers College, and Michigan State University. In addition to being a Ph.D. student, David is also a Zankel Fellow at the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET). His interests and experiences include student publication, student responses to pedagogical approaches, and teacher (co)education.
Stephanie Gomes graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2007 with a B.A. in English and in Sociology. Following graduation, she took a year off from school to volunteer in Baltimore (Sowebo) through the Bon Secours Volunteer Ministry. She worked at a Family Support Center providing early childhood education to children under the age of four and GED preparation to their parents. She returned to school to pursue her M.A. from Rutgers University, Newark in English Literature and wrote her thesis on the postcolonial symbolism of incest in Salman Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children" and John Banville’s "Birchwood".
Master’s completed, Stephanie began adjuncting at Raritan Valley Community College, teaching English Composition and Developmental Reading and Writing courses. Additionally, she taught a number of courses through Rutgers University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute to adults over the age of fifty on how musical theatre has reflected and affected American culture. Stephanie is now full-time faculty for Rowan College at Gloucester County and Coordinator for its English Composition 101 course.
Working at community colleges, Stephanie became invested in pursuing good student writing through research-supported methods and more progressive approaches. She is interested in student motivation, grammar and style development, and cultural exploration through reading literature – broadly defined – and writing. She intends to pursue these interests as she progresses through her Doctor of Education in the College Teaching of English at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Kelly is studying the development of creative play spaces in the teaching of college writing, namely how adolescents and adults can benefit from playing with modalities, avatars of creativity, and a dialogic community of learning. Also crayons and glitter.
Kelly teaches composition and creative writing at the City College of New York (CCNY.) She is also the Program Coordinator at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University. She trained as an actor and worked in film and television for several years, including helping to launch the Smithsonian Channel at Showtime Networks/CBS before returning to work in education. She has an M.S. in English from Utah State University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from (CCNY.) She writes YA fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.
Ileana Jiménez is the founder of Feminist Teacher (feministteacher.com), @feministteacher, and the #HSfeminism and #K12feminism hashtags which bring visibility to the national and global feminism-in-schools movement. An educator for over 20 years, she has taught in New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Her social media presence has lifted up the work of high school feminism teachers nationally and globally, bringing exciting visibility to the feminism-in-schools movement. Her doctoral research includes feminist and queer pedagogies; feminist identity construction and literacies; school-based activism and social justice; and feminist research methodologies. In 2011, she received a Distinguished Fulbright to interview queer youth in Mexico City about coming out, relationships, and harassment. Committed to feminist teacher education and professional development, she has presented workshops and symposia for teachers on intersectional feminist and queer pedagogies and activism in Argentina, Australia, Greece, India, Mexico, and the UK. She has also published in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (volume 1, 2016); Radical Teacher (vol. 106, 2016); One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better... and What Hasn't (Beacon, 2015); SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence (Feminist Press, 2015); The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future (Feminist Press, 2015); and was recently published in volume two of Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (Praeger, 2018). She received her B.A. in English Literature at Smith College, and an M.A. in English Literature at Middlebury College.
Felicia G. Tersan began her career 10 years ago as an English language teacher and was sent to serve in a rural school in the remote rainforest of Sarawak, Malaysia. While serving the school, she became aware of the needs of students in the rural area who have limited access to education and English language learning. This prompted her decision to become an instructional coach 4 years later so that she could work closely with teachers, solely focusing on research-driven classroom practices to accommodate varied student learning needs. As an instructional coach, she has had the opportunity to work on various nation-wide and state-wide projects as well as leading training workshops for in-service teachers focusing on improving English language learning. In 2018, she was one of the two recipients in the country who was awarded the Malaysian Ministry of Education scholarship to pursue a Ph.D at an overseas university, which led her to Teachers College. During her downtime, she loves baking, cooking, singing (she's a closet karaoke singer!), traveling, and exploring the beautiful city of New York.
Katie, a graduate of Baylor and Duke Universities, is beginning her PhD in English Education after 15 years as a classroom teacher and curriculum coach in Texas and North Carolina. Her experience spans various school settings and leadership in professional development. As a teacher, Katie’s peers honored her as Distinguished Educator of the Year. Her master’s thesis, “Moral Imagination in the Middle Grades ELA Classroom,” explored ELA, philosophy, and policy, and received an exemplary designation by Duke faculty with an invitation for Katie to present her work to the Duke community. Katie’s academic interests include beginning teacher support, critical literacy, diversity and equity, and early adolescent literature.
Katie and her husband are raising five year old twins who just began Kindergarten around the corner from TC. She begins this new chapter in light of her twins’ educational futures and the world she hopes they and their peers will know.
Josh is an English teacher at Geneva School on the Upper West Side. He received an M.A. in Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and is entering his third year of teaching in New York. Josh is interested in classical education—how it’s defined, how it looks in a modern context, what its benefits and drawbacks are. Josh’s favorite thing about teaching is seeing his students connect with their stories and find their voices as writers. He lives uptown with his three kids and his wife, who is also a teacher. Josh vacations in the Adirondacks every summer. One of his life goals is climbing all 46 of the Adirondack high peaks. But so far he’s only climbed one.
Lisa Chong lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband and two boys. She has been teaching composition and research writing as an adjunct at Rider University, New Jersey, for the past 14 years and had facilitated book groups for students in 4th to 11th grade for 12 years before entering TC as a doctoral student. She received an M.A. in English at Arcadia University in 2004 and an M.Ed. in Reading, Writing, Literacy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Her research interests include Asian American adolescents, dialogic discourse/classroom, literacy practices that foster multiculturalism and critical consciousness, and writing & identity.
Having worked in classrooms Romania, Brooklyn, Boston, and Jamaica, Kevin is, at heart, a teacher. He has been to a lot of schools, including a stint at Teachers College as a returned Peace Corps Fellow in 2003-2005. In the interim, Kevin entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in June of 2016. Since ordination, He has worked at St. Francis Xavier parish in Manhattan, the College of the Holy Cross, as pastor of a parish in Kingston, Jamaica, and, last year, he taught English and Philosophy at Fairfield University. Kevin holds degrees from Holy Cross, University of Toronto, an MA from the University of Chicago, two MA’s from Boston College, and an MA from TC. Having played and coached rugby for years, Kevin feels far too brittle these days to continue playing. Though he is a Bostonian, Kevin adores New York City.
Amanda has been teaching English and directing Theatre for nearly ten years. Before enrolling at Columbia, TC, she taught 9th grade (Freshman Academy) at NBHS, New Britain, CT. She also taught 8th grade Language Arts at OSMS, 9th grade (CP and Honors), and 11th grade (CP and American Studies) at OSHS, Old Saybrook, CT.
At present, her line of inquiry deals with how the distilled essentials of Drama Pedagogy foster a richer analysis of complex text. As an instructor at TC, she teaches [A&HE 4551] The Teaching of Shakespeare, to current M.A. English Ed students.
Recent workshops and presentations include:
[11/11] Smith Learning Center, NYC: The Debate Workshop: Critically Examining Sociopolitical Consciousness through Diverse Multimodal Practices, [11/16] National Drama Conference, Nottingham University, UK: Drama Matters in NYC: Embodying Textual Analysis, [11/23] NCTE 2019, Baltimore, MA: High School- College Partnerships and the Teaching of Writing. .
Prior to public school teaching, she obtained her B.A (Performing Arts) at Adelphi University, and her M.A (Curriculum and Instruction, English, TCPCG) at UCONN.
In 2018 she conducted research during the Literacy Unbound Summer Institute at CPET. This past Summer of 2019, she conducted research in the INSTEP Program at Lincoln Center Education.
As a regular old human, she is an avid reader, foodie, traveler, dancer, artist, and performance art goer. She is the proud Mom of a toddler and NYC is the love of her life.
When Kathleen was in third grade, she and her best friend invented their own language. They wanted to communicate without the interference of pesky teachers and other kids. The language offered new entries into the lexicon, private jokes and symbols for all the “bad” words. Although the plan was thwarted when a teacher snatched one of their notes, Kathleen held onto her love of letters, sounds, and images; writing her thoughts on the page made them real for her and her grade-school imagination. Kathleen has made a 20+ year career out of this passion for language. She has worked as an English teacher in public and private high schools and colleges in NYC and San Diego; earned two master’s degrees, and mentored new teachers. She is honored to be a doctoral student in TC’s English Ed program and keenly interested in writing-to-learn pedagogy. She credits her pioneering work in third grade for the inspiration.