Educational Design Team

Tracey Pyscher - Curriculum and Instruction Lead

Tracey Pyscher has been a curriculum and instruction specialist in K-12 urban settings and is now Assistant Coordinator of the English Education Program and an Instructor at the University of Minnesota Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her doctoral research explores critical literacy in urban schools and she led the design of LJA’s curricular framework. Along with completing her doctoral work, Tracey serves as an educational consultant in English Education and the ELA Common Core State Standards.

Dr. Rose W. Chu currently serves as Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Education in the Minnesota Department of Education and is a former assistant professor of the Urban Teacher Program at Metropolitan State University. Her specialty is mathematics education: teaching, advising and supervising prospective math teachers to educate diverse learners in our urban core. Her teaching and research interests include reform efforts in math education, and community engagement in educational equity and access. Previous to her joining the university in August 2004, Rose worked at the Minneapolis Public Schools for 8 years as a classroom teacher, a district math specialist, and a district math/science equity coordinator. Rose holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and was formerly a research scientist at Honeywell.

Uve Hamilton holds degrees in art and art history and has licensure as an elementary grades teacher. Her primary expertise is in the integration of the arts into non-arts subjects such as reading, math, science, and social studies. She has taught in a variety of settings: abroad in Indonesia and Singapore; an education outreach program at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and art history at Macalester College. For fifteen years she taught in the elementary grades in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Most recently, she served as Project Manager and then Director of Arts for Academic Achievement, a program of the Minneapolis Public Schools that brings community artists into classrooms to support student learning in and through the arts. She is currently on leave from the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Dr. Cynthia Lewis  is Professor of English Education at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in classroom discourse, response to literature, and adolescents’ uses of digital media. Her current research focuses on critical engagement in English classrooms in urban schools. Cynthia’s books include Literary Practices as Social Acts: Power, Status, and Cultural Norms in the Classroom and Reframing Sociocultural Research: Identity, Agency, and Power (with Patricia Enciso and Elizabeth Moje). Both books were awarded the Edward Fry book Award from the National Reading Conference. She is currently Co-Chair of the Research Assembly of the national Council of Teachers of English and has served on the executive board of the National Conference on Research on Language and Literacy.

Shannon Dahmes  comes to us with a back ground in secondary English education with a particular interest in composition and basic literacy. Her experience with board membership and senior administration in several charter schools has contributed to practical and regulatory considerations in curriculum design. In the future she hopes to do research to explore the efficacy of asset-based, whole-child, interdisciplinary curriculum and instruction to increase literacy for at-risk, and learning disabled students.

Dr. Nicole LaVoi Associate Director, Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, University of Minnesota.

Erin Twamley  College age youth consultant, Macalester.

Udgon Abdullahi  College age youth consultant.

Marc Wanvig Teacher Emeritus of Science, Minneapolis Public Schools.

Dorothy Hoffman  Former Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction, Minneapolis Public Schools.  Dorothy also served as the Education Director of LJA for the first two years of start-up.