Services

Speaking and Facilitation

Speaking to schools and communities allows me to share what I’ve learned from my decades of work. Are stress and achievement pressure reaching critical levels for your students, faculty, and staff? Are you eager for new frameworks and tools for approaching civics, community service, and effective change-making? If you want to do more than manage crises in the moment, I can help. If you want to understand the relationship between achievement culture and DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) work, count me in. If your girl-serving organization or single-sex high school looking for strategies to help girls avoid burnout and prepare for the demands and opportunities of college, you are in my wheelhouse.

I’ve addressed audiences of school and community professionals, students, parents, and more. If you are interested in a more interactive or in-depth experience, I also lead workshops and trainings (both virtual and in-person) for a wide range of audiences. Reach out and let’s talk about what we can do together.

Over the course of my career, I’ve developed programs and lesson plans on a wide range of topics. The Research Training Internship (later renamed the Research Training Intensive) was an intersectional feminist and social justice leadership program for Jewish teen girls which I co-created and directed at Ma’yan, a program of JCC Manhattan. Each RTI cohort began by building a common understanding of concepts such as power, oppression, and privilege, and culminated in a collaborative research project to address an issue of concern to participants (from entertainment media sexism to the “pushout” problem). The 2020 Vision civic engagement and activism program at JCC Manhattan was designed to offer high school students the knowledge, skills, and motivations they need for a lifetime of active and effective participation in civic life.

In my work at Westover School, I developed a toolkit to support faculty and staff in challenging achievement culture and building resilience with students. I’ve also written in a wide variety of contexts and venues, from publications in scholarly and popular outlets, to penning the framing text and interpretive labels for a photography exhibit on the history of protest in America (which I also curated). You can also learn about my most recent publications here.

Consulting

Schools and organizations have a lot on their plates, and consulting can help ensure that crucial areas of work and planning don’t fall through the cracks. I love getting to witness people doing work they care deeply about, and helping them to make that work better. I help my clients to see their challenges and opportunities more clearly, build institutional buy-in, engage in self-study, develop new resources and strategies, and plan for the future.

Research

As a researcher, I have experience with a wide range of qualitative methodologies, from critical participatory action research to cultural discourse analysis and from grounded theory to feminist ethnography. I’ve also conducted historical analyses including archival and oral history research. My dissertation, entitled What to Give the Girl Who Has Everything: Creating Leaders in an Affluent Suburban Adolescent Girl Scout Troop, was an ethnographic study examining how “girls’ leadership” was defined, discussed, and performed in a predominantly-privileged community. (You can read a chapter from this project in the edited volume, Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage.)

If you are looking to collect and analyze some data for your school or organization, or if you are interested in developing collaborative research with members of your community, I’d be happy to discuss how my skills can help you reach your goals.

Nobody gets through the dissertation process without a few moments (or months!) where they lose the forest for the trees and feel certain their efforts will amount to nothing. As a programmer would say, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! Success is a matter of figuring out how to move through the uncertainty and gain the perspective necessary to make real meaning of one’s data. Whether you are looking for accountability, technical expertise, encouragement, a sounding board for your work-in-progress, an editor to help sharpen your writing, or all of the above, I can work with you to move your research project towards completion.