Kelly Gavin Zuckerman

Visiting Assistant Professor of Education
Kelly Gavin Zuckerman headshot

Contact

Department/Subdepartment

Education

Ed.D., Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University

Areas of Focus

Culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies; urban secondary education; teacher education; critical self-reflection; arts-based qualitative research methodologies; student voice

Biography

Dr. Kelly Gavin Zuckerman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the ÀÏÍõÂÛ̳/Haverford Education Program committed to the development of culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogical practices across the PK-16 spectrum that support the self-actualization of all learners. This work is intentionally anti-racist and attentive to dimensions of difference and the intersection of identities. It centers critical self-reflection, particularly on the part of white educators, and utilizes arts-based methodologies as vehicles for rendering visible that which may not be otherwise seen or measured, rendering audible that which may otherwise be muted or silenced, and rendering perceivable that which may go unnoticed or underexamined.

Dr. Zuckerman began her career teaching English and Dance and Choreography in a small, public high school in the Bronx, NY before earning her Masters in Education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and doctoral degree in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. As a teacher educator and scholar, Dr. Zuckerman draws upon a critical constructivist framework that attends to the role of context, perspective, and power in educational settings and seeks to amplify and honor student voice and lived experiences, particularly of those who have been historically marginalized. Her theory of change in the field of education is rooted in the power of levity and learning, criticality and care, joy and justice, vulnerability and voice.