Sharon B. Hayes, Ph.D.

Sharon Hayes has been an educator for more than 30 years in elementary, middle, and university classrooms. Her work in public schools provided experiences in a number of places and grades and she learned, first hand, how our historical, social, and political conditions contribute to the disparities many of our students and their families experience in our educational system. Her current responsibilities, as an Associate Professor of Elementary Education and former program coordinator for the 5 Year Teacher Education program, have created opportunities for her to work with prospective and practicing teachers to interrogate the status quo and create more equitable and authentic curriculum and instruction. She is particularly interested in how we become educators over the course of our professional careers and how we embrace opportunities to disrupt and transform who we are and the places/spaces in which we live and learn.

Sharon is a qualitative researcher whose ongoing research interests focus on teacher becoming and identity construction, justice oriented teaching, creating collaborative spaces for professional learning, practitioner inquiry as a space to develop inquiry as stance, and how teacher education might create opportunities for prospective and practicing teachers, as well as teacher educators to transform their personal, local, and global views of teaching and learning, as well as the ways we do school.