I am an Associate Professor and Director of the EdD Program at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education in New Jersey. I am also the coordinator of the Education, Culture and Society Masters Program. My academic research has focused largely on education issues in China.  I am now the co-editor of the journal Chinese Education and Society which aims to acquaint an international audience with the research of Chinese scholars on topics relevant to education in China. I was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, where my parents moved as Baha’i pioneers, my mother from Finland and my father from the United States. I completed my undergraduate study in Biological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara and then traveled to China where I worked as a Foreign Teacher of English at Shanxi Normal University, Shanxi Agricultural University and then Xinhua Primary School in Macau. I received my Masters degree in Moral Education from Landegg International University and then my PhD in Education and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Recently, I am pursuing new research passions including guiding the work of my PhD student, Daniel Smith, who takes critical postcolonial perspectives to examine the involvement of international development organizations in educational development in his home country of Liberia. As a result of a Longview Foundation Global Teacher Education fellowship, I am also increasingly involved in efforts to promote global vision in education in K-12 settings as well as in higher education. Currently I am collaborating on a virtual exchange project entitled “Critical Global Citizenship Education for Educators” with faculty in Kenya, Nigeria, Libya, Mexico, and China. The virtual exchange brings together undergraduate students from across our six countries for various synchronous and asynchronous interactions. I am very excited to have been invited to collaborate on the Wilmette Institute course “Education for Material and Spiritual Prosperity” and for the opportunity to gain deeper understandings of the profound contributions of the Baha’i Revelation to our understandings of the purpose and power of education for reshaping our world.