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Nancy Anderson, MS, is a retired K-12 math specialist whose teaching career spanned 37 years and several locations – St. Lucia, American Samoa, and Salem, Oregon. She is currently an independent math consultant working as a teacher trainer and in K-5 classrooms, modeling lessons in best practice in mathematics.
Christine Chaille, PhD, is a professor of curriculum and instruction at Portland State University and chairs that department. She has been involved in promoting quality early childhood and elementary education through her teaching and research. She is past president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators. She authored The Young Child as Scientist, now in its third edition, and she is currently completing a book on constructivist early childhood curriculum.
Jacqueline Cooke, MS, has been an elementary classroom teacher for over 25 years. She is currently also a math consultant and curriculum writer, and an adjunct professor at Portland State University and George Fox University. In 1998 she was honored as the Elementary Mathematics PAESMT Winner, and in 2007 she was selected as Oregon Teacher of the Year.
Michael Cummings, PhD, is a professor in and previous chair of the Geology Department at Portland State University. His areas of expertise include hydrogeology, volcanic stratigraphy, and working with K-12 educators to make science meaningful to their students. He has provided in-class and field studies with students at all levels of K-12 and works with teachers in 26 districts in low population density regions of Oregon in single and mixed-grade classrooms and field investigations.
Elizabeth Dickey, MS, is a teacher and artist in the Portland community. She earned a degree in early childhood education from the University of Vermont, where she also received her teaching license. Liz recently completed her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in early childhood at Portland State University and continues to work in the program teaching graduate-level courses in early childhood education.
Barbara Shaw, PhD in evolutionary biology, was a National Science Foundation Fellow through the Center for Learning and Teaching in the West. Her research interests include the evolutionary relationships of Xenarthra, a superorder of mammals, as well as student comprehension of science, testable questions, and the scientific method. She has delivered science inquiry science programs throughout the Pacific Northwest to over 25,000 students, pre-K - adult, provided professional develop in scientific inquiry, and developed hundreds of hours of inquiry science programs for several organizations, including OMSI, National Wildlife Federation, and Saturday Academy.
Swapna Mukhopadhyay, PhD, associate professor, Graduate School of Education, Portland State University, is a mathematics educator focusing on issues of critical mathematics education and cultural diversity. The thrust of her work realizes that mathematics is a socially constructed mental tool accessible to all. In her formulation, Ethnomathematics, as a discipline, provides an intellectual space for future research and designing curriculum, an act that is synonymous to activism. She is strongly influenced by Freire and other scholars who have stated aptly that the intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual. She believes in alternative forms of knowledge and in validating the voices of people who are generally silent or deliberately not heard. For the last few years she has organized public lecture series on alternative forms of knowledge construction in mathematics at Portland State University. She is currently completing a book on culturally responsive mathematics with Brian Greer, Sharon Nelson Barber, and Arthur Powell. With her colleagues, she is working on another book entitled Words and Worlds: Modeling Verbal Descriptions of Situations.