DÉSIRÉE POINTER MACE is an assistant professor of education at Alverno College. Her work focuses on envisioning and inventing ways of representing teaching and learning using new media and online technologies. She has developed multimedia websites of exemplary practitioner inquiry for many years, beginning with her work at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. There, Pointer Mace and Ann Lieberman codirected the Goldman-Carnegie Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education, focused on the use of such websites in preservice teacher education, and the Noyce-Carnegie Quest Project for Elementary Literacy, which documented the relationship between classroom practice and professional development in elementary writing workshop. Pointer Mace and Lieberman are the founding coeditors of Inside Teaching, a “living archive” of teaching practice.
Pointer Mace taught elementary school for many years as a Spanish bilingual teacher and bilingual resource specialist in the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. She has worked with students from kindergarten through doctoral level in the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. She holds a BA in cognitive science from Vassar College and an MA and PhD in education with a concentration in language, literacy, and culture from UC Berkeley. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband, Michael Pointer Mace, and her children, Simone and Myles.