My Choice to Return to High School: Planting the seeds of Personal Power and Creative Equity in a Small Town

During this presentation, Dr. Leaym-Fernandez will conversationally share why going back to high school is a great choice for her and how her research supports this professional choice as she works with a diversity of learners in a single space.

For the most part, she enacts findings from her research to make changes in young lives, lives that for the most part may not have university experiences being resistant and an activist at the same time through her praxis.

About the Speaker

Dr. Melissa Leaym-Fernandez has a diverse life. As a biracial woman in America she learned at a young age the disposability of her little brown body, being raised by a single parent in poverty, overcoming devastating and life-changing trials she went on to be the only person in her family to attend university completing two bachelor degrees, two master’s degrees and finally her PhD with two areas of focus–art education & women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She has taught grades k-12, community college, and at the university levels, including in Flint Michigan during the ongoing Water Crisis, In India with leprosy-affected artists and their children, Penn State University and currently she teaches at Port Huron High School in Port Huron Michigan. Her research interest includes art education and adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, and gender representation in East and South media. She is currently working on her first book which will discuss how gender is enacted in TV, movies, Toons, and Music of East and South Asian Media.