Thursday, October 27, 2022
8:00 p.m. ET
Kimberly Eckert serves as the dean of Oxford Teachers College at Reach University while still teaching high school and serving as the innovative programs coordinator for West Baton Rouge Schools. She holds a B.A. in social work, an ME.d. in special education, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in learning, innovation, and instruction. An educator for 14 years, Eckert was a 2019 National Education Association Social Justice Activist of the Year national finalist, a 2018 Louisiana Teacher of the Year, a 2020 Global Teacher Ambassador, and the inaugural Louisiana Public Interest Fellow for her work as founder of the state-wide Educators Rising Program for targeted recruitment of a diverse and culturally responsive teacher pipeline.
Kimberly is also a reading specialist, having served as an instructional coach, master teacher, reading interventionist, mentor teacher, and English and special education teacher. She recently co-authored a book titled, Flip the System: US. She enjoys cooking, eating cheese, playing video games, and building with Legos.
Seth French teaches secondary English and media literacy at Bentonville High School (Arkansas).
Noted as a “30 under 30” awardee in 2021 by the International Literacy Association, French recently
served on NCTE’s Critical Media Literacy task force and contributed to NCTE’s revised position
statement on multimodal literacies. His work focuses on developing students’ critical media
literacies and integrating these literacies in the ELA classroom. You can follow him on Twitter
@gamesethmatch.
Nicole Mirra is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She previously taught high school English language arts in Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. Her research explores the intersections of critical literacy and civic engagement with youth and teachers across classroom, community, and digital learning environments. Central to her research and teaching agenda is a commitment to honoring and amplifying the literacy practices and linguistic resources that students from minoritized communities use to challenge and reimagine civic life. Her most recent book is Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement (Teachers College Press, 2018) and she is a coauthor (with Antero Garcia and Ernest Morrell) of Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students (Routledge, 2015).