Candidate for
School Director; Upper Merion Area School District; Region 2

Since I am running for the School Board, it is more appropriate to articulate my educational philosophy rather than a political one.

As a current professor of education at Drexel University, my teaching in the classroom includes elements of cutting edge research and connections to exciting technologies and concepts. Whether working with undergraduates or graduate students, my classroom environment is such that students are provided with ample opportunities to contribute their own ideas and pursue their own variants on the subject matter as they develop their skills.

My educational philosophy can be summarized as:

Caring about each individual, where caring means "individualization." Placing a value on academic competence while nurturing a positive sense of self, self-esteem, respect for others, and an understanding of and a commitment to democratic ideals/principles, are all values which must be promoted and modeled for students, but always impropria persona, i.e., each according to his/her own abilities.

As an educator, I believe I should be sensitive to the multiple voices and diversity the learners and I bring into the teaching-learning situation. To allow this to happen I attempt to create a learning environment characterized by participatory and emancipatory teaching methods such as cooperative inquiry, socio-dramas, story-telling, dialogue, simulation exercises, group discussions, role plays and critical individual reflections. In essence, I support learning that is active, problem-based, goal directed, and multi-dimensional based on the current research literature on best practices, while supplemented with personal and professional experience.

I conceptualize learning as an on-going, life-long process. It must be problem-centered and rooted in the real life and concrete experiences of the individuals engaged in the learning process. Transformative learning is most likely to take place when an individual has the ability to critically reflect and analyze her/his own and others' lived experiences, assumptions, beliefs and values with the ultimate goal of creating new knowledge and change in behavior. Learners engage in a transformative learning process in order to identify problems affecting their personal well-being and their society, the root causes of these problems, and explore practical solutions to such problems.