About

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Emily is a doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University studying Education & Communication in the Communication, Media, Learning Design, and Technology department. She holds a masters in Education, Culture & Society from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Her research interests and professional experiences reside mainly in the fields of critical media literacy, multimodal storytelling, and antiracist pedagogies and identity work.

Emily is particularly interested in the impact that mass media and popular culture images and messages can have on girls (particularly during adolescent identity development), and how to subsequently empower girls to use their voices and create their own media texts to speak back to the socially constructed representations and expectations of “beauty,” “success,” “happiness,” etc. that they confront on a daily basis. Emily has also become increasingly interested in hip-hop pedagogy, antiracist education, social identity work, and raising awareness and creating multiracial alliances in schools among students and teachers.

She is passionate about working with educators on how to deliver more culturally relevant and socially just pedagogy by incorporating more popular culture texts and media artifacts into classroom activities and discussions as a way to foster greater criticality and more effective/productive ways of talking about issues of “race” and “diversity” among 21st century teachers and learners.

Emily is also a curriculum consultant and teacher educator for The Media Spot.