About

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

–John Dewey

Professional Summary

Parent Conference I am currently a COVID refugee languishing in Beijing waiting to make the switch from serving as MYP Coordinator & Instructional Coach at Daystar Academy in Beijing to assuming my new role as MYP Coordinator and Theory of Knowledge Teacher at I-Shou International School IN Kaohsuing, Taiwan.

Before assuming my coordination role, I worked as IB History and IB Global Politics teacher at the International School of Beijing and as Learning and Innovation Coach at the International School of Curitiba. Before moving into international school teaching, I taught Advanced Placement World History & Global History and supervised the Model United Nations program at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem, New York. Prior to my tenure in New York City, I served as the Academic Counselor at Ewha Girls’ Foreign Language High School in Seoul, South Korea where I also taught Writing, International Studies and World History.

Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students, in the textbooks of their lives.

–Emily Style

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University, a Master of Arts in Social Studies Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and a graduate certificate in School Supervision and Leadership from Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to attending university I served as an Airborne and Air Assault Infantryman with the 8th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division. It is a point of personal pride that as a Screaming Eagle I served with the division tasked with safeguarding the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School.

Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence…

…But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

–Paulo Freire

This blog represents a number of interests of mine revolving around progressive education, futures learning, culturally responsive teaching for equity, social justice education, international-minded social studies, teacher coaching, cosmopolitanism, travel and the expatriate experience.

My social and political worldview has been called “Wildmind Satyagraha Bright Green Cosmopolitan Civic Communitarian,” but only by me. Always in Beta, I am still workshopping it.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

— Walt Whitman: from Song of Myself (1855)

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