Melissa Sherfinski
Associate Professor, West Virginia University
Melissa Sherfinski has been an educator for more than 30 years, first engaging with place-based education in the pond and woods near Crestwood Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin, as a preservice teacher, and later as a 4th- and 5th-grade teacher, kindergarten teacher, and home-based childcare provider. Melissa is currently Associate Professor of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at West Virginia University, where she worked in the 5-Year Teacher Education Program for a decade. She collaborated to infuse social justice education and a praxis orientation into program structures to support preservice teachers’ understandings and uses of multiple forms of teacher leadership for social justice aims and to spread “positive deviance” in order to locally disrupt aspects of the neoliberal system that contribute to exclusion, marginalization, and inequalities.
