Current Students

Meet Our Doctoral Students

David Beauzil

Ph.D. Student, English Education

David O. Beauzil is currently an ELA teacher with the NYCDOE and an Adjunct Professor at CUNY Queens College, Teachers College, Columbia University, and New York University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from St. John’s University in 2014 and his Master of Arts in Teaching from CUNY Queens College in 2019.
In 2023, David received the NYC Men Teach Role Model Award, recognizing his commitment to education and mentorship. As a Ph.D. candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, he aims to leverage his diverse experiences to create equitable opportunities for students in urban schools. His passion for education stems from witnessing students grow intellectually and emotionally, and he is dedicated to empowering them through essential skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. In his free time, David enjoys personal training, playing the piano, and traveling the world.

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Arts & Humanities

Lisette Boer (She/Her/Hers)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Lisette Boer is a current PhD student in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing with concentrations in poetry and fiction, alongside graduate minors in Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Storytelling from The New School.

Her teaching experience includes but is not limited to leading creative writing workshops through Milk Press Virtual Workshops, serving as a teaching assistant at Maplewood Headstart, and facilitating a literacy mentorship program at Mitchell Elementary. Professionally, Lisette has served as a Research Assistant to The New School's Creative Writing Director. She has also worked with various literary organizations in marketing roles such as The Poetry Society of New York, The New School, and The National Book Critics Circle, playing a key role in organizing events like the National Book Critics Circle Ceremony, the PEN World Voices Festival, and The NYC Poetry Festival.

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Arts & Humanities

Yami Cao (She/Her/Hers)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

I am a first-year PhD student in the English Education program, and my research interests are hip-hop literacies, racial literacies, and culturally relevant pedagogy. Currently, I serve as a graduate research assistant to Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, where I support projects under the Racial Literacy Project at TC. I also work as a teaching assistant in Columbia University's Asian Languages and Cultures department. My research will explore the intersection of hip-hop, art, culture, language, and education across global contexts.
I hold an MA in International Educational Development from Teachers College. I am the founder and president of the TC Hub of Dancers, facilitating dance events for Teachers College and the larger Columbia community since 2022. I won the Shirley Chisholm Award in 2023. I also have experience in culturally responsive teaching, having worked as a Mandarin and dance instructor in China, Mexico, Pakistan, and the USA

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Arts & Humanities

Victoria Dumas (She/Her/Hers)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Victoria Dumas is a PhD student in the English Education program with a passion for empowering students and teachers to capitalize on the liberating powers of literacy. She specializes in creating culturally sustaining curricula grounded in anti-racist pedagogy. Throughout her career, she has fervently advocated for English curricula that reflect and uplift the lived experiences of BIPOC students. Her research interests center on integrating curriculum design and storytelling to position students as protagonists in their educational journeys. Victoria's calling is to support the movement of Black and Brown stories and storytelling from the margins of academic discourse to the forefront of literary study.

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Tara Fernandes

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Tara Maria Fernandes is a third year doctoral student of English Education at Teachers College. Her research explores Literature in Community, a topic deeply inspired by her 7 years teaching in an international school in Bangalore (India). Using Book Clubs, immersive reading projects, and field trips to get her students excited about entering and dwelling in the literary realm, Tara's work weaves her experience as a high school teacher in Bangalore together with her current projects as a doctoral student in New York. Along with teaching graduate-level courses in literature pedagogy (like the Teaching of Shakespeare), Tara also runs a book club in her international graduate residential community: The I-House Book Club. Her research questions include what it means to bring a community to literature, and the experience of being a part of a living literary web.

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Arts & Humanities

Edith Middleton (She/Her/Hers)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Edith is a Ph.D. fellow in English Education; devoted to exploring teacher education and mentorship, specifically for mid-to-late-career teachers. She embodies 15 yrs of college and public high school teaching in Connecticut and Hawai’i as an English teacher, and teacher leader. She is National Board Certified and a recipient of prestigious Fulbright and Pulitzer Center fellowships. In addition to her academic pursuits, she is an adjunct professor, a student teacher supervisor, and deeply involved in graduate student leadership, serving as Chair-Elect of AERA’s Graduate Student Council, Co-Chair of ELATE’s Graduate Student Board, and Co-Founder and Executive Secretary of AATC’s GSC. Edith fosters supportive living environments as a residential Community Assistant and co-founded the Feminist Circle, a TC student organization advocating for gender equality. She leads professional development workshops on AI literacy and writing instruction to engage educators with emerging technologies.

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Arts & Humanities First-Generation College Student Student-Parent

Chukwuma Mueme (He/Him/His)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Among my interests is to explore African and diasporic African fiction, not as part of a subfield of minority literature whose existence is willingly accommodated by western institutions, but as a corpus that transcends the domination of western epistemologies. Specifically, I try to dig into twentieth and twenty-first century novels from Africa and diasporic African localities and engage the cultural, material, and textual dimensions of these African and diasporic texts. The goal is to reimagine some pedagogy that appropriately teaches the principles of literariness and cognitive artefacts contained in these texts.

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Arts & Humanities

Rohini Parikh

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Rohini Parikh is a NYC-based TC alumna and a veteran English, ESL, EFL, and English Education Lecturer who has returned to TC to earn a PhD in English Education. She is an alumna of the US Department of State English Language Fellowship Program with the US Embassies in Morocco and in Turkey. Rohini began her English teaching career as a US Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) and Lecturer in Sichuan Province, China. After completing PC, she was admitted to the PC Fellows Program at TC and became a long-term educator with the NYCDOE. During her career, Rohini earned tenure as a high school educator with NYS teaching certifications in English and in ESL. Her professional experience also includes English faculty and leadership positions at universities in Turkey; in Morocco; in Saudi Arabia; and in China. Rohini’s research includes the teaching of English, ESL, EFL, and English Education; English medium instruction; teacher education; international education; curriculum development; and edtech.

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Arts & Humanities

Toni-Ann Ricketts (She/Her/Hers)

Ph.D. Student, English Education

Toni-Ann Ricketts is a middle school English-Language Arts Teacher who is passionate about developing and implementing curriculum that is culturally relevant and sustaining. Deeply influenced by her own journey as an immigrant scholar, Toni-Ann's research interests lies at the intersection of identity formation, cultural or ethnic identity, assimilation, acculturation, and the translation of blackness. She hopes to further the discourse surrounding black literacies and how they materialize in the English-Language Arts Classroom; as well as their impact on the development of knowledge for immigrant students of African and Caribbean diaspora.

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Arts & Humanities

We are delighted to announce the launch of our new online profiles for Doctoral Students at Teachers College.

If you are a currently enrolled doctoral student at Teachers College, please visit the profile submission page for more information on how you can create your own profile.