About

I am a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at Virginia Tech, and I expected to graduate in Spring 2025. I formerly taught secondary social studies for four years in Virginia public schools. At Virginia Tech, I teach education courses, supervise preservice teachers, and engage in research activities. I also work as an Educational Consultant for the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region.With my research, I aim to promote history education that develops in young people an understanding of the interpretive nature of historical knowledge, engages them in historical inquiry, and supports them in making sense of themselves and their world as historically situated. This aim motivates my research interest in history curriculum as a social and historical construction and my investigation of the following research topics:
• pedagogies for teaching and learning history,
• history curriculum and curriculum history, and
• the pedagogical decision making of history teachers.
Through investigation of these topics, I aim to push the field to think critically about the affordances of the ideas about historical knowledge that frame history education. An immediate goal of my research is to provide actors in the field of history education with insights about teaching and learning history which they can use when teaching and mentoring preservice teachers, designing curricula, and conducting professional developments
I explore the following questions:
• How is historical knowledge defined in the field of history education? What perspectives are present in the definitions and concepts used to frame history curriculum and instruction?
• How do teachers and learners perceive and experience methods of history instruction?
• How do teachers make pedagogical decisions when enacting history curriculum within their school cultures?
This research has implications for how pedagogies for history instruction are used by teacher educators, curriculum designers, and classroom educators.My current research projects include a comparative analysis of the development of conceptions of historical knowledge in Europe and North America, and an investigation of how widely accessible AI applications influence teachers’ perspectives on and approaches to assessment.As an Educational Consultant for the Library's Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region I am part of the leadership team for the Transformative Teaching Initiative. This initiative provides professional development to Methods Professors about the use of primary sources for inquiry-based instruction.I am published in The AAEEBL ePortfolio Review (2024), The International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2022), The Journal of Social Studies Research (2021),and the Hollywood or History? Inquiry-Based Strategies for Teaching History with Film (2021a; 2021b) book series. I presented research at the national conferences NCSS-CUFA (2024; 2023; 2022) and AERA (2023); and I was invited by the National Park Service to share my research about Black Public History at the Booker T. Washington National Monument. Additionally, I have presented professional developments about the educational applications of digital technologies and instructional strategies for student-driven inquiry at national and regional conferences.

• Curriculum Vitae

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