Our Students | Teachers College Columbia University

My dissertation research is exploring the experiences of ethnic minority female PE teachers from a critical perspective through narrative inquiry, life history, and visual methodology. I have been teaching Physical Education for 9 years and plan to become a teacher-educator after completing my degree.

Awards:

Hally Beth Poindexter Young Scholar Award from 2020 NAKHE (National Association of Kinesiology in Higher Education) Conference: This award acknowledges a new professional in the field, employed for a period of 5 years or less, who is currently working at an institution of higher education.

The Mabel Lee Award from SHAPE (Society for Health and Physical Education) at the 2020 National Convention: The Mabel Lee Award recognizes younger members who have demonstrated outstanding potential in scholarship, teaching, and/or professional leadership 

Lawrence F. Locke Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Paper from the Research on Learning and Instruction in Physical Education special interest group, AERA 2016

I am a doctoral student and my research focuses around promoting meaningful physical culture(s) and embodiment of ethnic-minority female adolescents with usage of social media platform.

My past research involved both quantitative and quantitative work. I worked at University of California, San Francisco for RCT research to promote physical activity and healthy eating for overweight and obese pregnant women and mothers using mobile technology. For qualitative study, I helped investigating cultural discourse and perspectives of girls-only skateboard groups in the Bay Area with faculty members from California State University, East Bay.

As a Caribbean-American, born and raised in New York, I have had a lifelong passion to better myself, and the community around me. It is this passion that led me to join the United States Coast guard, and use my experience as a competitive swimmer to teach swimming from a holistic approach in urban communities. A Master’s Degree from Adelphi University reinforced my interest in community sports-based youth development. It is my goal, as a doctoral student, to make a difference, working with young people through sports and swimming. Through my research, using Hellison’s Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility Model, I hope to show that physical education and sports is more than skill acquisition. It is about making positive and long lasting social change among minority youth and their communities.

As a life-long athlete, critical thinker, freestyle soccer performer, and music lover, it seems only fitting that sociocultural issues in physical activity is the place for me. The complexities of this discipline will allow me, as a Master’s Student, to deepen my understanding and critique of how gender, race, and socioeconomic status intersect and are articulated in physical culture. My work, as a youth soccer program director and teacher in a progressive public school (k-5), has only enhanced my position as an advocate for children who occupy spaces of marginality, through gender, race, or class. My goal, at Teachers College, is to develop a curriculum that critiques gender order in sport, and to bring about a humanistic revolution in the way sport and PE are taught to future generations.

Originally from Brazil, my journey in Physical Education began in 2007 when I moved to the United States to pursue a new college degree and career. Currently, I hold a Masters’ degree from Montclair State University, NJ. Teaching a diverse community has been both a blessing and a challenge, which is why I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Education. My passion for teaching stems from the impact that education has on people. My philosophy of teaching is based on the belief that learning needs to be student-centered and that students need to be equal partners in the learning process. 

My name is Mark, and I graduated from TC with MA in Physical Education (PE) in Oct 2018.

I am currently working in the Physical Education and Sports Teacher Academy (PESTA) based in the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST), which comes under the purview of the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Singapore.

In PESTA, my main scope of work involves in-service professional development of Physical Educators.

My interest area in PE is closely related to my work at PESTA, which is professional development of PE teachers, in particular, looking into the development of pedagogical content knowledge of elementary school PE teachers.