About

Anita is Senior Lecturer and Director of Secondary Teacher Education at Bates and previously taught high school English for over ten years. In the past, she has taught a wide variety of ages and abilities, from first graders in Jersey City, NJ, through adult learners, teaching subjects as diverse as French and Alternative Education programming.

She has mentored many new and student teachers, and has presented statewide workshops on a wide range of topics, including autism in the classroom, special education topics and laws, multiliteracies, and effective teaching methodologies.

As a Fulbright Scholar in India in 2016 and again in 2023, Anita taught undergraduates and explored issues of literacy and inclusion in preK-12 schools and programs. Subsequent to her first Fulbright, she engaged in research on inclusive education for children with disabilities in India. Thanks to a Bates-specific Phillips Fellowship, she recently conducted a study on education nonprofits in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Anita has a Ph.D. from University of New Hampshire in the area of Adolescent Literacy. Her dissertation entitled “‘It’s Just Part of What We Do’: Adolescent Interactions with Multimodal Texts Across Social Spaces,” won two national awards. She holds an M.Ed. from Harvard in Human Development and Psychology with a special focus on Language and Culture, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College in French and Education. Her scholarly interests include Teacher Education, Literacy, Comparative and International Education, and Special Education.

Anita has a chapter entitled “‘There’s a relationship’: Negotiating cell phone use in the high school classroom” published in Researching New Literacies: Design, Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation (Knobel & Lankshear, eds). She has published numerous articles as well as a chapter in an anthology entitled The first Year of Teaching: Real World Stories from America’s Teachers.

Anita has five adult children and lives in Lewiston, Maine, with her husband.