Research Interests
History & Social Studies Education
Burma/Myanmar
Refugee & Immigrant Education
Curriculum Studies
Qualitative Research Methods
TESOL
Standards-Based Assessment for Learning
Discourse Analysis
Social Semiotics
I am an anthropologist of education interested in the conflicts that arise around history, identity, and language in the classroom. My articles have appeared in Comparative Education Review, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and International Review of Qualitative Research, as well as in a number of edited volumes. My textbooks, Teaching World History Thematically: Essential Questions and Document-Based Lessons to Connect Past and Present (2020) and Teaching US History Thematically: Document Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom (2017; 2023), were published by Teachers College Press; my blog about this approach to teaching social studies, "Big Questions, Many Answers," is available here. I am also the author of thematically organized, document-based textbook called Histories of Burma, which is available for download from its publisher, Mote Oo Education. My CV is available from my faculty page at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Education's Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum. My scholarly work is available for download from academia.edu and researchgate.com.
Recent Publications
Negotiating for meaning along language borders: Refugee families from Burma/Myanmar in a US public school district. (Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2022).
Comparative authoritarianism: Vicente L. Rafael’s “The Sovereign Trickster” and Erin Murphy’s “Burmese Haze.” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022)
(with Aung Khine) Putting Down Our Weapons When We Talk About History: Using Primary Sources Documents to Teach Multiple Perspectives on Burma's Past (Bloomsbury, 2022)
(with Will Brehm) The UNESCO Shared Histories project: Paradoxes and possibilities (Teachers College Press, 2022)
Emerging alternatives to military “slave education” (Frontier Myanmar, 2021)
I thought I understood parents of language-learners. Then I became one. (EdWeek, 2021)
The third face of education: Moving beyond the good/bad binary in conflict and post-conflict societies (Compare, 2020)
(with Felicitas MacGilchrist) Trickbox of memory: Essays on power and disorderly pasts (Punctum, 2020)
Humane assessment shouldn’t happen only during a pandemic. (Inside Higher Education, 2020)
A missed opportunity for schoolroom reform (Frontier Myanmar, 2019)
The white gunman, the anti-Semitic entrepreneur, and other dilemmas of a history textbook author (Social Education, 2019)
We need to talk about the consulting industry in educational development (CIES Perspectives, 2019)