Current Students

Alexa graduated with a BA in Music History from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Historical Musicology from the University of Cambridge. She completed her PGCE in secondary education at Roehampton University. A native Londoner, Alexa spent twelve years working as a teacher and school leader before joining the Philosophy and Education program at Teachers College. Alexa’s research interests include educational ethics, pupil and teacher agency, confidence and pupil empowerment, and the relationship between education systems and society.

Born in the Bronx, NY, Robert discovered his passion for philosophy during his senior year of high school. After graduating from La Salle University with a BA in Philosophy and Communication he discovered that he also had a strong passion for education, and he was determined on becoming a professor of philosophy. In his words, “The greatest way in which I can add to the betterment of society and incite social change is by influencing the minds of our future generations. I intend to get to the root problems in education and reform it in a way that will empower individuals to achieve their personal goals, not simply join in the rat race of the monotonous workforce.” His research interests include but are not limited to education policy, epistemology, and existentialism. He is also interested in thinkers like Dewey, Rousseau, and Montaigne. Robert currently works as a presenter with a company called Elevate Education in which he goes out to middle/high schools throughout the five boroughs and he helps the youth to become better students by teaching them various study skills and belief systems. When he is not engaging in scholarly endeavors, he can be found skateboarding around the concrete jungle of NYC.

Cathy Bi was born in Beijing, China. She attended high school in New Jersey, and recently graduated from Boston College with a degree in Philosophy. She is interested ethics, education, and the arts. Previously, Cathy interned and volunteered at various nonprofit organizations including the United Nations and the Interfaith Food Pantry Network. In her spare time, Cathy enjoys spending time in the gym, cooking with friends, and hanging out at the dog park.

Sebastian comes from a Cuban-American family on eastern Long Island and holds a BA in Anthropology from Vassar College and an MS in Development Practice from UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley he was a TA in the Gender & Women’s Studies department. Sebastian has worked both domestically and internationally as an educator, mostly in agricultural science and most recently in Paraguay with the Peace Corps. Sebastian is currently interested in studying the metaphysics of curricula but is very open to weighing new ideas, directions, and questions. Outside school, Sebastian enjoys bikes, boats, hikes, basketball, music, and gardens. He's also learning to play chess.

I am a first-year MA student in the philosophy and education program. I graduated this year from St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, with degrees in philosophy and psychology. I found there are many common grounds shared by psychology and philosophy, where philosophy could give broader theoretical guidance in the practical psychological framework. I am especially interested in early childhood education and its following personality development, which I believe could give me a further understanding of epistemological and ontological questions.

Kevin is a first-year Master’s student hailing from Chicago, where they helped oversee educational programs of a nonprofit K-12 learning center working in one of the two largest Rohingya refugee communities in the United States. Kevin is interested in critical social theory and education as a prefigurative practice. They like to connect with youth, activism, and others committed to social transformation and imaginative play. Kevin is Mexican-born and holds a B.S. in Mathematics from DePaul University.

Benjamin Mensah is a returning MA student in the philosophy and education program. He is the founder and CEO of B.A.K CONSTRUCTION INC, the founder of GCS Limited; an educational consultant firm that primarily focuses on consulting for K12 education and higher education on pedagogical approaches toward online, in person and hybrid teaching methods. He is also the founder of GCS Live; an IT consulting firm that focuses on the technological usage, impact, and advancement in relations to the human condition. He is currently completing an MS in Special Education at Brooklyn College while finishing his MA at Teachers College. Highly inspired and motivated by his educators and mentors, Ben enjoys the daily challenges of education & technology. When he is not at the library or in his studies, you will find him in the construction industry contributing to building the next infrastructure, spending time with his family, biking, kayaking or simply watering his garden while enjoying the breeze.

Hieu earned his Bachelor from London School of Economics (UK) in 2007, his Ph.D. from Stanford University (USA) in 2012, and an MBA from University of Oxford (UK) in 2016. Hieu is a leading expert in Vietnam’s education sector, directly setting up and transforming 100+ Vietnamese and foreign K-12 schools, colleges, education institutes, non-profit organizations, ranging from boutique models to big-scale systems, in multiple capacities: school model design, new school creation, school restructuring, product R&D, professional development, general management, corporate finance & strategy, system operations. As a teacher & professor, Hieu has taught the entire range of primary, middle, high school, college, graduate school students, young professionals and corporate executives across multiple subjects. Dr. Nguyen is a pioneering thought leader in Vietnamese education and an active contributor on national news, media as well as a published author with numerous best-selling books in education and related issues.

Brittany holds a BA in English and art history from Muhlenberg College and an MA TESOL from the New School. She teaches English as a Second Language at the American Language Program, Columbia University. Brittany’s pedagogical interests include extensive listening, critical thinking, and incorporating art, poetry, and music into ESL instruction. At TC, Brittany hopes to study the relationship between poetry and education and the ethics of English-language teaching. In her free time, Brittany reads and writes poetry about rock and roll, films, and other poems.

Theseus has spent the past two decades working at a nonprofit youth organization, where he developed, implemented and managed comprehensive afterschool programs for elementary and middle school students in public schools throughout Manhattan. These programs supported learning goals in literacy, STEM and leadership development through project-based learning. He is currently building a new nonprofit organization that will work to support the social/emotional needs and mental wellness of children and teens.

Kayla Tanenbaum graduated Columbia University in 2014 with a B.A. in English and Sarah Lawrence College in 2019 with an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction. For the past three years, she been teaching literature and composition to undergraduates in New York City. Her work as an educator inspired her to approach pedagogy philosophically at Teachers College. Kayla is most interested in the relationship between education and dignity and plans to explore how educating for beauty can serve as both a tool for liberation and as a bulwark against the alienation imposed on students by contemporary capitalist values.

Emilia has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland-College Park. Her experiences with researching empathy in STEM education surprised her, resulting in a desire to pursue more philosophical questions about STEM and education. Emilia also currently teaches kindergarten and first grade Math full-time at a public charter school in the South Bronx.

I am a first-year Master of Art student in the program. I was born and raised in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China. I graduated from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina in May 2021 with a BA in Philosophy and a minor in Interdisciplinary Humanities. I enjoy doing comparative philosophy between the East and West. I am also interested in higher education, especially the very idea of liberal arts education. My broad coursework and research in philosophy, education, and humanities gradually shaped my belief that there are common features underlying liberal arts education and the deep-rooted Confucian humanistic learning. Thus, I want to explore differences and similarities among philosophical foundations of education interculturally. Their shared aspiration to cultivate and to realize human flourishing in different ways is fascinating. Besides doing philosophy, I am also learning to be a gourmet, chef, and photographer.

Maxwell Anthony is an incoming doctoral student in the Philosophy and Education program at Teachers College. Prior to TC Maxwell taught High School Latin and studied Ancient Greek and Latin in the Rutgers University Classics Post-Baccalaureate program. He received a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD and a BA in Philosophy from George Washington University.  

Emy Cardoza is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, where her research interests include critical race theory, higher education, and the concept of reconciliation. Prior to joining the TC community, Emy earned a Master of Divinity from the University of Chicago Divinity School, a Master of Education from Loyola University Chicago and a BA in Religious Studies from Rollins College. She currently serves as the Associate Dean for Student Life at Barnard College.

I got my Bachelors in Philosophy from Biola University. There, I also participated in the Torrey Honor's Institute Great Books program. I've been teaching for 2.5 years, and I am thrilled with M.A. program in Philosophy and Education.

Juan Antonio Casas is a Ph.D. student at the Philosophy and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. He obtained his Law degree from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, and an Ed.M. in Private School Leadership from the Klingenstein Center at Teachers College.

Born and raised in Bogotá, he moved from the practice of law to education as a middle and high school Social Sciences teacher at Gimnasio Campestre, a nationally-recognized K-12 boys school, where he taught for five years and served as Head of School from 2006 to 2017. His experience as a school leader and classroom teacher inform his research interests in moral development, curriculum design and school improvement.

Before starting his PhD in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Stefan earned his MA from the same program. He is primarily interested in American Pragmatism, particularly the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey. Stefan is also interested in the teaching of ethics, and he regularly serves as a judge at the annual Long Island High School Ethics Bowl.

Yuval Dwek is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy & Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Yuval completed his B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His academic interests include civic education, political and social philosophy, philosophy of emotions, and moral psychology. He is passionate about the possibility of exploring new pedagogies and conceptual analysis in conflictual societies to cultivate democratic capacities and better civic dialogue.

Nick teaches first year courses, philosophy, and humanities courses at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, CUNY. His research looks at how public school teachers' critical relationship to the apparatus of teaching can facilitate a more open learning environment for their students. He enjoys the outdoors and lives in Brooklyn.

I got my B.A. in Philosophy from Universidad de Los Andes in 2014. I then taught high school philosophy, which is part of the Colombian curriculum, for five years. I am mainly interested in animal ethics in education, psychoanalysis, and teaching philosophy in schools.

Elias Hage is a third year Philosophy and Education Ph.D. student specializing in (early) phenomenology, hermeneutics, and 19 th -20 th century theories of social learning. He’s currently interested in questions pertaining to the experiences of self-identity and purpose and the role of mimesis in learning. Before this program, he earned an MA in Religious Education from Fordham University and an MPhil in Philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Vikramaditya (Vik) Joshi is a second-year doctoral student in the Philosophy and Education program. Before coming to Teachers College, Vik graduated from Bard College with a B.A in Philosophy and Literature. He then graduated from the University of East Anglia with an M.A in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction. He served as an academic advisor for the Bard Prison Initiative, a college-in-prison program. He held a fellowship at the Center for Justice at Columbia University and is currently part of the inaugural cohort of Fellows at the Gathering for Justice. He led the development of a curriculum on anti-Muslim bias, supported by EdVenture Partners, the McCain Institute, and the Department of Homeland Security, securing funding and the Invent2Prevent scholarship. He is working on a manuscript (biography) of a Professor at Bard who was a spy in the French Resistance. Vik’s research at TC is focused on the work of B.R Ambedkar, an architect of the Indian Constitution and, in 1913, a student at Columbia University under the tutelage of John Dewey.

Joseph earned a B.S. in Biology from Georgia State University in Atlanta and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education from Piedmont College, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow. After obtaining his master’s in 2017, he taught science and coached athletics at public schools in Georgia and Indiana. Joseph’s research interests are epistemology, ethics, and teacher education. More specifically, he wants to explore the interaction between ethics and epistemology, including the concept of judgment in John Dewey’s philosophical thought, and the potential implications for teachers.

Rashad Raymond Moore is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Rashad is a graduate of Morehouse College with a B.A. in Philosophy, as well as Union Theological Seminary with a Master of Divinity in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary. His master thesis was titled, "Beating Back the Demons: The Role of Narratives, Rituals, and Sites of Memory in The Spelman College Experience.”

Rashad enjoys researching and writing on the philosophy of historically Black education, as well as concepts pertaining to joy, becoming, and imagination.

An ordained Baptist preacher, Rashad currently as Assistant Minister at The Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York.

As an Alaskan Athabaskan, Buddy has a deep connection to philosophy and education as a means to thrive. His work in virtue epistemology has lead him to philosophy of education, and to questions like: how is epistemic value related to moral and eudaimonic value?  He has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Alaska, and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Victoria. Along with studying the love of wisdom, Buddy has worked as an outdoor educator in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, China, and throughout Alaska. He is an avid snowboarder, skateboarder, surfer, chess player, student of life, and is at Columbia University in the City of New York to study the axiology of education.

Sam Piede joins the program fresh from receiving her M.Ed. in English Education from Millersville University, focusing her research on the staging of absurdism in theatre post World War II.  A teacher first and above all, Sam has served for ten years as the gifted coordinator for Elizabethtown Area High School in Elizabethtown, PA and instructed both the school's Inquiry Seminar and the AP Capstone courses (AP Seminar & AP Research).  She also works as an academic dean for the Summer Institute for the Gifted.  Sam is a staunch advocate for inquiry-based and democratic classroom models, and she is interested in exploring the epistemic and ethical underpinnings of high school language arts curriculum development, particularly in how students are exposed to research tasks.  She is excited to have found a program and cohort that values exploring similar issues.  When not teaching and learning, she enjoys rock climbing, reading science fiction, and indulging in/critiquing the works of her two favorite Johns (Dewey and Rawls).

Eileen Reuter graduated from Ave Maria University with a Bachelor's degree in Politics. She finished her Master's degree in Education from Rhode Island College while spending two years teaching with the Teach for America. She is currently a third year doctoral student in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Throughout her time there she has tutored middle school students and worked in administration at a charter school in the Bronx. She and her husband Chris are looking forward to the birth of their first child this spring.

Sulki Song is a Ph.D. Student in the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned a B.A. in Education and M.A. in Philosophy of Education, both from Seoul National University, South Korea. Her master thesis was titled, “Education for the Formation of Self-Identity: Drawing upon Charles Taylor’s Concept of Authenticity.” She is deeply interested in answering the question philosophically: what does the education look like as a way of supporting human beings to live their own lives fully and freely? Her current research interests include identity formation, value education, character education, and the concept of understanding, especially during the school-ages years.

Rebecca Sullivan is a PhD student in the Philosophy and Education program. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Notre Dame. After working for a few years in the human service professions, she has returned to the formal study of philosophy to deepen her understanding of personhood and the intersection of philosophy and education that happens through everyday actions and encounters.

The title of her masters thesis was: "Bearing Witness to a Knowledge of Encounter: The Power of Perspective in Babette's Feast."

Prior to his arrival in New York City, Rory worked as a teacher at Scottsdale Preparatory Academy, a Great Books-based liberal arts school in Arizona. Before that, Rory earned a B.A. in American History and an M.A. in Political Theory, both from Arizona State University. Rory's time in the Sonoran was preceded by a deeply cherished period of immiseration, commonly called ‘youth,’ in the Appalachian backwoods of Western Pennsylvania.

Rory’s most salient philosophical, moral, and political commitments are to critical theory, integral theory, cosmopolitanism, and direct deliberative democracy. These commitments shape his feelings, thoughts, and actions in two important ways. First, these commitments mean that he seeks always to unite theory with practice, as beautifully summed up by Marx: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Second, these commitments mean that the end to which this union of theory and practice is directed, always, is human liberation—from hierarchy, oppression, injustice, false consciousness, and the illusion of the self, among other things. Through such emancipation can arise autonomy, actualization, and transcendence, and Rory believes that helping to realize these potentials for all persons, including oneself, should be the purpose of any compassionate life. This way of being is exemplified, in Rory’s opinion, by Nietzsche’s figure of Zarathustra, whom he therefore denies accordingly.

Safiye Yigit graduated from the University of Houston in 2007, where she majored in Sociology and minored in Psychology. She also holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. For her Master's thesis, she has written on “Curiosity as an Intellectual and Ethical Virtue” and has given numerous lectures and talks in Turkey, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, US, UK, and Poland on curiosity. From 2012 to 2015, she worked as a Researcher at Bogazici University as part of a research project entitled “Curiosity: Epistemics, Semantics, and Ethics” directed by Ilhan Inan. As part of the project, she organized an international conference gathering various notable philosophers working on curiosity and is the co-editor and a contributor of the book Moral Psychology of Curiosity (forthcoming in 2018, Rowman and Littlefield) that came out of a series of curiosity conferences that took place in Istanbul, Slovenia, and Washington. She is also contributing a chapter entitled “The Curious Case of Curiosity: A Virtue or a Vice?” to the forthcoming book Just Curious About Curiosity: Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know. She has published articles in the Parmenideum Journal of Philosophy and the Croation Journal of Philosophy.

After studying virtue epistemology and intellectual virtues, she then became interested in the philosophy of education, and educating for intellectual virtues and wisdom. Currently, Safiye is continuing her studies as a doctoral candidate in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Last but not least, she is married and the mother of two boys: Selim and Halim.

Ting Zhao received her B.E. in Materials of Science and Engineering from Zhengzhou University, China. During her undergraduate period, she realized her love and passion for education. So after graduation, she went to Beijing Normal University to study the Foundation of Education and got a M.A. in education. There she developed a more systematical understanding of education as well as love for philosophy of education. Before coming to Teachers College, Columbia University, she went to the Ohio State University to study philosophy of education and got her second M.A. in education. She was enrolled in Philosophy and Education program in Fall 2017. Her current research interests include teacher education, Chinese traditional philosophy and education, the aesthetic education, and cosmopolitanism.

Xiaochen Zhao is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also has an Ed.M. from this program. Before joining TC, she earned her B.A. in English from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her research interests include enchantment, thingness, temporality, affect theory, and how the related issues are discussed in the broader study of aesthetics, literature and education.