Education. Imagination. Liberation.
Hi! I’m Charlotte!
As a 4th and 5th grade special educator, researcher, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY, I am passionate about making schools healing, imaginative, and liberation-minded spaces where students can thrive as compassionate thinkers and world-builders.
As a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, my research, titled Dreams of a New Way, explores how Black girls use speculative fiction to heal, express identity and (re)imagine possible futures.
Educational Philosophy
Educational Philosophy
Daily Ifá (2025)
My practice is grounded in the pan-African philosophy Ubuntu: I am because we are. I believe that education must be liberatory, humanizing, and joyful. In my classrooms and programs, children are co-creators of knowledge who use storytelling, inquiry, and creativity to connect learning to their lived realities. Teaching is my activism, and my activism is healing.
Drawing from Black Feminist Thought, healing-centered education, and scholars like Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, and S.R. Toliver, I design spaces where joy, resistance, and community care coexist. I aim to dismantle systems of oppression in schooling while nurturing each child’s capacity to dream a freer world into being.
Experience
Education
Ed.D. in Curriculum & Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University (2022 – present)
M.A. in Elementary Inclusive Education, Teachers College, Columbia University (2016)
B.A. in Psychology, Africana Studies & Latine Studies, Williams College (2013)
Community Organization
Anti-Racist Education Liaison
Student Union (StU) Creator and Advisor
Teaching
4th & 5th Grade ICT Classroom Teacher at The Neighborhood School, Manhattan NY (2023 – present)
6th - 12th Grade ICT Classroom Teacher at The Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx (2015 – 2023)
Professional Development
Whole Girl+ Education National Conference Presenter
Instructional Leadership Team Facilitator
Research Interests
Black Girlhood, Storytelling, and Healing
I study how Black girls author radical speculative fiction to make sense of their experiences and imagine liberated futures. Through creative expression, they reframe pain into power and transform everyday realities into acts of resistance.
My dissertation, Dreams of a New Way, explores how the process of writing speculative fiction shapes Black girls’ understandings of identity, possibility, and healing. I view storytelling as both pedagogy and practice of freedom: a way to reimagine education beyond survival.
Liberatory and Healing-Centered Pedagogies
I design and study classrooms that center joy, care, and collective healing as forms of resistance. Grounded in the work of Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, and Shawn Ginwright, my pedagogy resists the education survival complex and nurtures spaces where students—particularly those from the Global Majority—can thrive holistically.
My work invites educators to imagine classrooms as communities of restoration and creativity, where students are co-authors of knowledge rather than subjects of white supremacist, settler colonial, capitalistic control.
Speculative Futures and Educational Imagination
I’m deeply interested in how imagination functions as a political and educational tool. By blending Black Feminist Thought with speculative world-building, I explore how youth co-create stories that challenge dominant narratives and envision liberatory futures.
My scholarship engages Critical Childhood Studies, DisCrit, TribalCrit, Queer Pedagogies, and Posthumanist Thought, expanding what counts as knowledge, who gets to be a knower, and how we collectively dream new worlds into being.
Let’s Connect
I welcome opportunities to collaborate with families, educators, and researchers who believe that education can be an act of liberation and love.
If you’d like to learn more about my pedagogy, research, or the Dreams of a New Way program, please reach out using the form provided.
Let’s dream and build together ✨
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
— Angela Davis (paraphrased)