Project: EMMET

Dr. Michael B. Dando is an Assistant Professor of Secondary English Education and Language at Saint Cloud State University. An award-winning author, artist, educator, and scholar with nearly two decades of classroom experience, his work explores popular culture’s significance and potential as a site of critical self-expression, critical literacy development, and democratic activism and engagement. He has shared his passion for hip-hop and education with national and international audiences at various academic conferences, has been published by various academic journals, and has had his work featured by multiple media outlets and publications including ESPN’s Undefeated, Vibe, CNN, PBS, The Today Show, and the South by Southwest Education Festival (SXSWEdu).

He is currently collaborating on the construction of the Universal Hip-Hop Museum in New York, and a number of other projects studying popular culture, education, and design.

Project: Learning in the Making

Anna Jordan-Douglass received her Ph.D. from the department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she researched arts integration, maker education, digital media and games. She is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Makefully, a studio dedicated to the research, development and design of innovative educational technologies and media. Anna is also an active educator in STEAM and maker education, both in formal classrooms and afterschool programs.

Projects: Whoopensocker & Arts Collab

Amanda is co-owner of Meep Meepleton’s World of Fun and member of Whoopensocker. She first led a classroom at the age of 16 at her local dance studio, and, after attaining BAs in dance and English, taught dance throughout Chicagoland. Between then and now, Amanda attended the arts administration Master’s program at Columbia College Chicago, worked at several nonprofits, and for the last decade has been bringing arts education to 2nd-4th grade public school students. This arts education is delivered by being an arts educator herself, but also by raising funds for programs, creating assessment procedures, and building a community of adult people to support the ideas of children.

Projects: Youth Media Arts Organizations

Dr. Damiana Gibbons Pyles is an Associate Professor at Appalachian State University. In her projects with Erica, her research interests focused on media production, identity, and media literacy practices in order to understand the intersections of the visual, the spoken, the written, and the performed in digital and print literacies in youth media production in non-profits across the U.S. In this work, she created an analytic methodology called multimodal microanalysis to understand the media products young people create. At Appalachian State, she teaches courses for preservice and practicing teachers to learn how to integrate media and technology for teaching and learning. Her current projects continue the media studies work she did with Erica through various literacies studies in kindergarten classrooms and in online spaces.

Projects: Learning in the Making | Libraries & Museums

Alexandra Lakind is a doctoral candidate in Education and Environmental Studies. She is an artist, organizer, early childhood educator, and scholar. She owes much to the education she received at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and New York University, where she studied theater and applied performance. From 2013-2017, Lakind worked to collaboratively design “Bubbler,” Madison Public Library’s arts and maker programming. Lakind has disseminated this research in publications such as Reference & User Service Quarterly; Makers, crafters, educators: Working for cultural change; Journal of Radical Librarianship; and Journal for Learning through the Arts. Currently, Lakind's scholarly writing revolves around institutional reflexivity, environmental futures, and collaborative art-making.

Projects: Arts Collab

Description goeYorel’s desire to study West African traditional music led him to the Kankouran West African Dance Company in Washington, DC to learn from Master Drummer Medoune “Dame” Yacine Gueye, and Master Dancer/Artistic Director Assane Konte becoming a senior drummer with the company in 1998. His desire to master Afro-Cuban percussion led to study with Jorge Delgado at the Harbor Conservatory for the performing arts in Spanish Harlem. Yorel performed as a percussionist in New York and abroad and also led his own 10 piece NYC-based band, Melee, serving as a resident band at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café. He is a founding member of the Handphibians of Madison, WI.

In 2000, Yorel founded Drum Power Inc. (www.mydrumpower.com), a youth leadership program that uses learning West African Traditional, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban percussion to help young people practice life skills—discipline, community and leadership. To date Drum Power has supported more than 3,800 young people from New York City and Madison, Wisconsin. Academically, his research centers on youth empowerment teaching to better understand, develop and support student self-efficacy.s here

Projects: Learning in the Making | Libraries & Museums | Critique in Art & Design | Youth Media Arts Organizations

Breanne K. Litts is an Assistant Professor in Instructional Technologies and Learning Sciences and director of Learn Explore Design Lab at Utah State University. She investigates how people learn by and collaborate through making, designing, and producing and develops technologies and learning environments to support these interdisciplinary activities. Her scholarly interests combine identity, learning, design, and technology, particularly from a learning sciences perspective. Dr. Litts examines how to leverage place-based storytelling to engage young people in cultural and civic issues as well as computational and technological design practices. Her overarching goal is to democratize disciplinary learning and legitimize making as learning. She collaborates and co-designs with academic, K-12, library, museum, industry, and other community partners. With NSF support (AISL #1623404), Dr. Litts currently works with her co-PI’s and in partnership with American Indian communities to co-design culturally responsive maker activities and spaces and support diverse knowledge systems in disciplinary-based learning environments by leveraging narrative- and place-based approaches.

Projects: Learning in the Making | Libraries & Museums

Rebecca Millerjohn is the teaching & learning librarian with the Bubbler at Madison Public Library. Rebecca is a previous six year classroom working in Houston Texas as a Teach For America Corps member and at Gary Comer College Prep on Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of UW’s School of Library and Information Studies, her library work focuses on school age programming, educator support, and maker education with MPL's Bubbler program. As the Bubbler’s project manager for their Summer of Making Internship and Making Spaces initiatives, she loves sock monsters, power tools, paper circuits, and when kids get little scrunched faces that shows they are THINKING. Her current work includes the creation of the Bubbler’s Impact blog and research into making & learning assessments and practices.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker

Katherine Norman is a graduate student in Educational Psychology in the Educational Neuroscience Lab atthe University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies from the UW-Madison with a focus in Theatre for Youth, and a BFA in Acting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the intersections of theatre and cognition. In addition to academic work, Katherine is also a professional actor (Equity Membership Candidate) and teaching artist. Favorite performance credits include work with Door Shakespeare, Double Edge Theatre, Adishakti Theatre/Dash Arts, and the Missoula Children’s Theatre. Favorite teaching experiences include work with Interlochen Center for the Arts, the Children’s Theatre of Madison, the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project, the Maher Ashram, and the Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam. She has been a teaching artist and performer with Whoopensocker since 2016.

Projects: EMMET

Jessie Nixon is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the department of Curriculum and Instruction with a targeted focus on digital media production. Her research interests include youth digital production processes, digital storytelling, and critique practices. Jessie’s current research explores the role of formal and informal critique practices in video production in formal and informal learning spaces. Before graduate school, Jessie taught high school English in Virginia and Alaska. After receiving her M.A. in English, she joined the English Department and taught freshman composition at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker

Caleb Probst is currently a graduate student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Wisconsin – Madison. He is interested in the intersections of creative arts, education, and social-emotional learning. Prior to starting graduate school, Caleb spent more than a decade in Chicago working as both a teaching artist and a violence prevention educator. He has worked professionally as an actor and director in Chicago and in regional theaters across the country. His artistic interests include acting, directing, writing, and stand-up comedy. Caleb’s favorite food is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and he is an adoptive father of twins.

Projects: Critique in Art & Design

Nick Rabkin, principal at reMaking Culture, is a consultant, researcher and planner in the arts and arts education. He has been a theater producer, deputy commissioner of cultural affairs for Chicago, the senior program officer for the arts and culture at the MacArthur Foundation, directed the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago, and a senior research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago. He has worked on two cultural plans for the City of Chicago and a plan for the arts at Cornell University. He has done evaluation for the Rockefeller and the Irvine Foundation’s arts philanthropy programs. Research projects include the first (and only) national study of teaching artists and an analysis for the NEA of the decline of arts education in US schools. He was the project director for Critique and Metacognition in Art and Design education

Projects: Arts Collab

Stephanie Richards is the Operations Manager for the UW Community Arts Collaboratory, administering, evaluating, and growing arts outreach programs that empower youth. Stephanie earned her Masters in Public Health from University of Wisconsin-Madison and has served in various community outreach capacities within UW for 10+ years. From Industrial Engineering, leading research and training programs across the country to Public Health, coaching community coalitions to advance health and equity throughout Wisconsin. In her spare time, Stephanie is an aerialist, producer, and fundraiser at the Madison Circus Space.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker | Libraries & Museums | Critique in Art and Design

Projects: Learning in the Making | Libraries and Museums

Emily Schindler studies the design and outcome of teacher professional learning environments. Her current research focuses on research-practice partnerships for maker-based teacher professional learning in museums and libraries. She is the co-founder of the Wisconsin Teacher Studio, a maker-based professional learning group for educators throughout Wisconsin which meets in informal learning environments, and mobilizes the expertise of local artists, makers and maker-educators to expand sources of teacher learning and expertise. Areas of interest also include the study of making as embodied learning, arts and technology integration in formal learning environments, and research practice partnerships as modes of discursive apprenticeship. Her graduate work is supported by a University of Wisconsin Graduate School University Fellowship and the Netzer Wendt Scholarship.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker | EMMET | Critique in Art and Design

Andy Stoiber is a graduate student in education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he's zealously exploring the relationship between arts, technology, identity and learning. An advocate, practitioner, and consumer of dance, comics, theater, journalism, and wine, he's eager to investigate how such things are fertile grounds for making sense of the world.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker

Jonathan Tunstall is an educator, hip hop/spoken word artist, and PhD student at The University of Wisconsin Madison. Jonathan Tunstall taught 7th/8th grade social studies for eight years in Harlem. During his time as an educator he focused on creating culturally relevant pedagogy through arts integration, specifically using hip hop and spoken word as a counter narrative to the dominant Eurocentric history curriculum. He currently works as a teaching artist with Whoopensocker and a supervisor in the teacher education program, while working on his PhD in hip hop education.

Projects: Arts Collab & Whoopensocker

Nathan T. Wheeler is currently a Ph.D student in the top-ranked Department of Curriculum & Instruction studying Creativity and Informal Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's prestigious School of Education. He is researching innovative 21st century approaches to how people learn with an emphasis on the process of learning through artistic production, especially ensemble-based literary adaptation (“from page to stage”), as well as making devised theater. Other scholarly pursuits include: collaboration; creativity; innovation; qualitative methods; meaning-making; curricular and instructional design; learning through transgression; pedagogy; performance studies; technology; human development and public intellectualism.

Project: Libraries & Museums

Dr Rebekah Willett is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has conducted research on children’s media cultures, focusing on issues of play, literacy, identity, and learning. Her publications include work on makerspaces, playground games, amateur camcorder cultures, online gaming, and children’s story writing. She has published in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals in the fields of education, childhood studies, media studies, and library and information science including Children & Society; Convergence;Learning, Media and Technology; Library Quarterly; and Media, Culture & Society. In addition, she has co-authored and/or edited five books and contributed to numerous edited books and encyclopedia projects.

Projects: Learning in the Making

Peter J. Woods is a doctoral student in the Curriculum & Instruction department at UW-Madison. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the teaching and learning practices that emerge from experimental music communities and making through the arts, an approach that draws equally from the learning sciences, visual cultures, and critical theory. Woods is also a touring musician and performance artist. He runs FTAM productions (a record label and concert promotion organization that has hosted the Experimental Education Series, the Noise Knowledge Consortium, and theMilwaukee Noise Fest) and serves as the chair of the music committee for the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, WI.