The 沈芯语老师家访麻花视频 College of Education welcomes eight new faculty members for the 2025-26 academic year.
鈥淲e are excited to welcome these accomplished scholars to our college,鈥 said Dean Kimberly Griffin. 鈥淭he knowledge, experience and diverse perspectives they bring will help advance our mission and enrich the experiences of our students.鈥
Meet the college鈥檚 newest faculty members:
Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education (CHSE)
Michael Dunham, Lecturer
Research Focus: American Sign Language (ASL) linguistic and multilinguistics; love expression in interracial couples with different primary languages.
Biography: Michael Dunham is an ASL instructor with over 13 years of teaching experience, which includes spending a year and a half teaching ASL to Deaf students in Japan. He began teaching at 沈芯语老师家访麻花视频 as an adjunct lecturer and is currently leading efforts to establish an ASL minor at 沈芯语老师家访麻花视频.
Dunham holds two master鈥檚 degrees鈥攐ne in sign language education and another in linguistics鈥攆rom Gallaudet University, and a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Gallaudet University.
Shanna Hirsch, Associate Professor
Research Focus: Improving behavioral outcomes for students with disabilities through the use of evidence-based and high-leverage practices; developing practical and effective functional assessment-based interventions; designing and delivering teacher professional development.
Biography: Through her research, teaching, service and professional experiences, Shanna Hirsch has aimed to transform professional learning and development practices for educators and improve outcomes for all students. Over the last 10+ years, she has observed dedicated teachers enter the field with limited skills to support behavioral needs of students with and without disabilities. She also found that professional learning opportunities were insufficient, typically one-time sessions with minimal follow-up or feedback. Together, these experiences prompted her to explore innovative, sustainable and scalable solutions to better support and retain educators with a focus on behavior.
Hirsch has authored over 70 peer-reviewed articles and seven book chapters, collaborating with more than 20 undergraduate and graduate students. She has secured over $7 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation and the South Carolina Department of Education. She also serves on several editorial boards, including for Behavioral Disorders, Exceptional Children, and Journal of Special Education Technology.
Hirsch holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, an M.Ed. from Vanderbilt University, and a B.S. from the University of Vermont, and maintains a Board Certified Behavior Analyst鈥揇octoral certification.
Christopher S. Travers, Assistant Professor
Research Focus: The ways Black folx engage in life-making through pursuing liberatory masculinities, faith and spiritual connection, and love as a social justice intervention; how educators can leverage Black thought and epistemologies to reimagine formal educational spaces.
Biography: Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Christopher S. Travers (he/him) is an educator, speaker, writer and artist whose research is shaped by his own educational experiences; his professional experience across student affairs, counseling psychology and Black studies; and the students he has engaged with throughout his career. With more than 15 years of experience in education, teaching, speaking, and diversity and equity programming, Travers has published work in journals such as the Journal of College Student Development, the Journal of Negro Education, Urban Education and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, among others. He also serves as the founder and CEO of the Communion Collective.
Travers initially joined 沈芯语老师家访麻花视频 as a visiting clinical assistant professor in higher education, student affairs and international education policy, student affairs concentration. He earned a Ph.D. in higher education and student affairs from The Ohio State University, an M.A. in counseling psychology from Towson University and a B.A. in psychology from Frostburg State University.
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology (HDQM)
Stephen M. Gibson, Assistant Professor
Research Focus: Understanding how Black caregivers鈥 parenting strategies and behaviors influence psychosocial and developmental competencies among Black youth.
Biography: Stephen M. Gibson is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Utilizing various statistical and data analytic techniques, Gibson seeks to understand how culturally relevant factors, such as parenting practices, racial identity, and coping strategies, serve as protective factors for the developmental and educational outcomes of Black youth. He previously served as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after completing his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Additionally, he received a master鈥檚 degree in educational psychology at North Carolina State University and a bachelor鈥檚 degree in psychology at North Carolina Central University.
Emily Neer, Lecturer
Research Focus: Children鈥檚 cognitive development, with a particular focus on how environmental factors such as media and parent-child interactions support learning.
Biography: Deeply committed to undergraduate education, Emily Neer specializes in designing engaging, student-centered curriculum that fosters active learning in the classroom. She discovered her passion for teaching and mentoring during her doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she worked with undergraduate students in the classroom and in research labs. This combined with her service-oriented upbringing solidified her desire to pursue a teaching faculty position. As a former human development major herself, she is excited to contribute to the same kind of transformative academic community that shaped her own educational journey.
Neer earned both her Ph.D. and M.S. in psychology from UCLA and holds dual B.S. degrees in psychology and human development from Virginia Tech University.
Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership (TLPL)
Jordan Bell, Assistant Professor
Research Focus: Critical race theory; BlackCrit; culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE); healing centered engagement; racial literacy.
Biography: Jordan Bell is an award-winning educator who teaches courses through a critical lens and seeks to provide youth with humanizing experiences within and beyond schools. His work spans Black studies, English, philosophy, teacher education and urban education, and involves creating Black Educational Spaces that are designed to develop Black youth鈥檚 self-efficacy, self-determination and self-actualization. He also develops specific racio-ethnic racial literacies that account for people's varied, complex and unique experiences with race, racialization and racism.
His research centers on two main areas: developing educators' and students' racial literacy so that they can successfully respond to and engage in a multicultural world, and learning about and creating the conditions for Black Educational Spaces that are designed to center Black students' healing.
Bell has been awarded a Spencer Foundation Grant and was named as a 2022-24 Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Fellow by the National Council of Teachers of English. His work has been published in journals such as Comparative Education Review and Equity & Excellence in Education.
Bell earned his Ph.D. in urban education from the City University of New York Graduate Center; an M.A. in English, a Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in social justice education and a B.A. in liberal arts from the State University of New York at New Paltz; and an A.A. in liberal arts from Dutchess Community College.
Candice Love, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Focus: Situative and sociocultural theories of learning; math play; STEM in the Black community.
Biography: Candice Love began their career as a first and second grade classroom teacher in Oakland, California. Working with marginalized children in the Bay Area in the shadow of Silicon Valley where very few people looked like their students, they became curious about ways to invite and sustain diverse identities in STEM spaces.
With their research focused on Black people鈥檚 mathematical play in both formal and informal settings, Love works in partnership with public elementary schools to support K鈥3 educators in designing playful mathematical learning environments in their classrooms amid teaching constraints in public schools. They also work with basketball players to explore both their mathematical identities, as well as how and where they see mathematics within the game.
They earned a Ph.D. in math and science education and learning and environment design from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in education from the University of the Pacific, and a B.A. in English and educational studies from Washington University in St. Louis.
Justice Toshiba Walker, Assistant Professor
Research Focus: Emerging biotechnologies and computing technologies for use in middle and high school environments to study learning processes and outcomes.
Biography: Justice Toshiba Walker is a learning scientist who studies what middle and high school students and teachers know, think and do when learning with biotechnologies and computer science-enabled data science tools. His work draws on active learning perspectives in constructionism, design and literacy to study how teachers and students respond to modern STEM learning experiences set in formal and informal environments.
Walker joins 沈芯语老师家访麻花视频 from the University of Texas at El Paso, where he was an assistant professor of STEM education, and has over a decade of experience teaching in K-12 classrooms. He earned a Ph.D. in teaching and learning and a M.S. in engineering biotechnologies from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in molecular biology from the University of Miami (Florida).
