About
I was raised in the Appalachian foothills, where listening to elders was taken seriously. At ten I began recording voices on a Tandy CTR-80 cassette recorder, and the habit became a discipline. I have kept it up across five continents and more than two dozen countries.
I trained as a historian at the University of Michigan. My doctoral research on the rise of universal public education in the nineteenth-century United States drew on hundreds of letters, teacher observations, and school records in archives across the Midwest. It left me with a working rule: a source is worth preserving for the questions future generations may bring to it.
I have followed that conviction into unconventional classrooms. I taught high school in Honduras, Micronesia, and metro Detroit, prepared teachers for migrant and first-generation communities from rural California to the Bronx, taught incarcerated college students through the Bard Prison Initiative, and advised United Nations and NGO partners on teacher training at refugee camps in Bangladesh and Kenya.
Most recently I led continuing and lifelong education at two of the largest university extensions in the country. At UCLA I served as Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs, responsible for half of Extension's academic portfolio, while directing the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a self-sustaining community of more than 2,000 seasoned adults in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. I paid attention there to what people were ready to say late in life, and to the questions no one was asking them. That practice has a name, geragogy: the teaching and learning of seasoned adults.
In 2025 I left UCLA and walked the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Canada, 2,655 miles, carrying a field recorder. I asked the hikers I met whether the trail was an extension of their lives or a break from them. I finished with more than one hundred interviews and a trail name, Verbatim.
Current work
Later-life learners are sharpening the questions that have long driven me, now against the backdrop of AI and the rise of synthetic content. My research asks what distinguishes a life history conducted by a person from a biography generated by a machine.
- Visiting Fellow, Digital Life Initiative, Cornell Tech
- Can Oral History and Auto-Autobiography Have a Candid Conversation
- History Keeping: Recording a Life in the Synthetic Age
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Public writing
- Why Today's College Students Don't Want to Be Teachers
- The Teaching Crisis That Unions and School Districts Won't Address
- K-12 and the Election: A New Policy Path
- The Liberal Arts Role in Teacher Education
On air
Career
- 2023–2025
- Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs
- 2022–2025
- Director, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
- 2022–2023
- Director, Education, Humanities, and Social Sciences
- 2019–2022
- Program Director, Teacher Credentialing
- 2019–2022
- Senior Education Advisor
- 2013–2019
- Director, Master of Arts in Teaching Program
- 2007–2013
- Faculty, Master of Arts in Teaching Program
- 2005–2007
- Assistant Professor of History
Selected scholarship
- Building a Culture of Evidence through Professional Development
- Investigating the Value of History in the Preparation of Teachers
- The Challenges of Overcoming Pop Culture Images of the Sixties
- Using Museum Resources to Engage High School Students in Historical Thinking
- School Reform, the First Amendment, and Civility in the 1990s: The Construction of A Statement of Principles for Religion and Public Education
- Subject Matter and Method in the Preparation of High School Teachers: Pedagogy and Teacher Education at the University of Michigan, 1871–1921
Education and honors
- Ph.D., Educational Foundations and Policy
- M.A., Curriculum and Instruction
- B.A., History and International Studies
- Fellowships and leadership programs