2025 Curriculum Inquiry Writing Fellows

Jacqueline M. Cofield, Ed.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research explores the intersections of curriculum, pedagogy, and the arts with a focus on multimodal literacy, culturally sustaining education, and social justice. Her award-winning dissertation, Beyond Beauty: Black Women Artists’ Epistemologies and Aesthetic Praxes, sought to realize curricular possibilities emerging from the study of artistic practice. She has taught in K-12, higher education, and museum contexts, designing curricula that center experiential, embodied, and arts-based learning. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College, where she teaches courses that integrate multimodal and arts-based pedagogies. As a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cofield integrates curriculum studies with museum pedagogy, exploring how informal and formal learning spaces—including classrooms, museums, and community sites—serve as dynamic arenas for knowledge production. Through her podcast Beyond Beauty, she extends these conversations, highlighting the artistic and intellectual contributions of Global Majority women artists.

John Pierre (JP) Craig is a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Their dissertation centers the theorizing of Black and Indigenous youth researchers in an afterschool land education program as they made meaning of the climate crisis through participatory research and visiting, as an Indigenous feminist practice, with urban Land, waters, and more-than-human kin. This reflects Craig's broader agenda which contributes to collaborative climate research with communities and Land, arts-based and speculative design methods, and the historical and ongoing conditions of Black-Indigenous worldmaking.

Elaysel Germán is a Dominican-American educator, researcher, and literacy advocate. She began her career as a reading and language arts teacher before transitioning to literacy coaching, where she led curriculum design and professional development for K-8 out-of-school programs. She has collaborated with community educators, teaching artists, and youth workers to implement culturally and historically responsive literacy practices that cultivate the linguistic and experiential knowledge of Black/Latinx students.

As a PhD candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, her research engages Black feminist thought, critical literacies, and urban geography to examine the intersections of antiblackness, literacy, and place. Using auto/ethnography, she investigates how Black/Latinx urban youth create knowledge through their participation in literacy practices and events within community spaces.

Beyond academia, she collaborates with community educators and organizers to co-develop literacy events that provide children and youth opportunities to examine power through reading and storytelling. She has also contributed to book access efforts in NYC, expanding the availability of culturally affirming texts for children. In recognition of her contributions to literacy work, she was named a Literacy Leader in the International Literacy Association’s 30 Under 30 (2019).

Amelia Simone Herbert (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Education and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching draw on anthropology, comparative education, and Black studies to interrogate the roles education plays in the construction and subversion of racialized urban inequality. Her forthcoming book manuscript is an ethnography that examines how youth, families, and educators navigate the racial and spatial politics of aspiration in the increasingly marketized schooling landscape of Cape Town, South Africa. Amelia’s commitment to researching the complex meanings of schooling in lived experiences is fueled by her professional experiences as a teacher in Newark public schools and as a teacher educator with schools in New York City and Cape Town. Amelia’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Association of University Women, and the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation. Her dissertation won the Council on Anthropology and Education’s 2023 Frederick Erickson Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her recent work appears in Comparative Education Review and The Black Scholar. During the Curriculum Inquiry Writers’ Retreat, she will complete a manuscript titled “’Caste education throughout the world’: The Racial Politics of US-South Africa Educational Policy Borrowing”, based on archival research she conducted as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy [They/Them] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Dr. Krishnamoorthy is a science educator and learning scientist and their scholarship broadly examines the sociopolitical dimensions of youths’ learning. Their research questions examine how we might decolonize science education from a diasporic South Asian positionality by considering the many precolonial histories that shape classroom science teaching and learning. This has involved collaboratively developing justice-oriented curricula with youth and teachers that desettles Eurocentric science and values multiple knowledge systems, and where science learning is aimed at our collective liberation.

Juanita Sandoval is a PhD candidate in the Teaching Learning and Sociocultural Studies Department at the University of Arizona. She was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was an educator for ten years. As an academic, she is interested in the intersections between teacher preparation programs and arts-based teaching methods, specifically to guide educators when working with diverse linguistic and cultural communities. She is also interested in working with migrant and refugee populations along the U.S./Mexico border. Her dissertation research is centered in migrant shelters throughout  Sonora, Mexico where she studies the roles pedagogy and activism play within spaces that aid migrants.