President
Barbara Stengel
Vanderbilt University
Dr. Barbara Stengel is professor emerita of philosophy of education and teacher education at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of several books, most recently, Toward Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy with Liz Self, Harvard Education Press, 2020 and is the co-author, with Gert Biesta, of “Thinking Philosophically about Teaching” in the American Educational Research Association’s Handbook of Research on Teaching (2016). In recent years, Dr. Stengel has explored emotions like courage and fear in educational practice, taken up intersections between classical pragmatism and post-modern, critical, feminist, and new materialist theorizing, and posited critical pragmatist optimism as a stance for (re)constructive educational action in a precarious world. Currently at work on a book project that focuses on responsibility as the orienting concept for understanding education as moral practice, she is also collaborating on a podcast to represent the life of a school in Nashville, TN that was turned around through a thick school-university partnership. Dr. Stengel is the oft-delighted grandmother of Henry, Will, Maggie, Francis, and Lucy.
Immediate Past President
Kyle Greenwalt
Michigan State University
Dr. Kyle Greenwalt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His educational background includes a BA in philosophy at the University of Chicago, a MEd in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota, and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, also at the University of Minnesota. His professional background includes two years teaching English at a high school in rural Hungary, and four years teaching social studies at a public, PK-12 school in rural, northern Minnesota. His research is grounded in the study of student and teacher experience, drawing upon the traditions of pragmatism, feminism, and phenomenology. His early work looked at the school as a site of nation-building. More recent work has led him to explore the educative potential of home and family in an age of high-stakes, compulsory school attendance. He is the faculty director of the secondary social studies licensure program at Michigan State University, working with teachers across Michigan to prepare the next generation of teachers to educate children for democratic living. He is also the editor of the Journal of School & Society, a journal of intelligent practice for justice-minded educators. He is the father of three children, and loves Spartan basketball, gardening, hiking, canoeing, meditation and yoga.
Executive Secretary and Treasurer
Becky L. Noël Smith
California State University, Fresno
Becky has been involved in the field of education since 2002. As a former public school teacher, a mother, a community organizer, and through her academic work, she advocates for democratic policies and practices in the public’s schools. She earned her PhD in Instructional Leadership, with an emphasis in Social and Cultural Studies, from the University of Alabama in 2018. She is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fresno, where she has the privilege of putting to use her teaching and learning experiences in her work with current and future teachers in California’s Central Valley. Her teaching is grounded in the tenets of social foundations, democratic pedagogy, and Deweyan inquiry. Her current writing projects focus on the aesthetic and moral dimensions of the craft of teaching, the persistent struggle to make public schools more humane, and the place and meaning of a Deweyan conception of soul within the process of growth. Becky’s most recent publication is Love in Education & the Art of Living (Information Age Publishing, 2020), a book in the Studies in the Philosophy of Education Series that she co-edited with Randy Hewitt. She was also President of the Southeast Philosophy of Education Society in 2022.
Emerging Scholars Liaison
Kathleen Sellers
Duke University
Kathleen Sellers is a Postdoctoral Associate affiliated with the Religion and Social Change Lab (RaSCL) at Duke University. Her scholarship applies a critical lens to the policy impacts, pedagogy, and philosophy of religious schools, educators, and school systems in the U.S. and globally. Dr. Sellers holds a PhD in Educational Leadership from Miami University, a Master of Theological Studies from Boston College, and a dual BA in International Studies and Theology, also from Boston College. Previously, she taught in an urban Catholic secondary school in Ohio and worked immigration law. In her role at Duke University, Dr. Sellers contributes to qualitative data collection and analysis for the Seminary to Early Ministry (SEM) Study. This longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-cohort study follows divinity school students from matriculation into the early years of their careers seeking to understand how seminary impacts students’ health, occupational wellbeing, theology, sociopolitical disposition, and career trajectories.