About

Growing up, I didn’t know I had a body. I thought it was just a thing I used to carry my head around. That was where all the work really happened — alone, inside my skull, making decisions, figuring out what to do with my life.

That started to change in college. Through theater and dance, I learned that my body had desires and instincts of its own, and that the ways I responded to the world were also shaped by the music, by the room, by the shoes I was wearing, by the people around me. I was not alone. I had never been alone. It turned out that dancing was something I did together with the world.

To spell out the obvious, dancing here is a metaphor. When I say I was dancing with the world, what I mean is that I was figuring out how to respond to my ever-changing environment. I wanted to know what to do. For a long time, I thought one day I would have an answer and be done. Now, I understand that’s not the point. The point is to keep dancing. The world keeps changing, we keep responding. That’s all there is.

And yet, when we talk about education, we talk about it as if, through it, we were preparing for something yet to come. But what is it for? Having spent much of my life in and around schools and learning communities of all kinds, I kept noticing that nobody seemed to be asking the most basic question: what is all of this for? Not cynically — genuinely. Education is one of the great human projects. What are we actually trying to do?

Learning from Evolution, I think we’re trying to keep dancing: to continue to respond to the world, one step at a time.

To do that, we, like every other living thing, draw on what came before and transform it. We inherit and we mutate. We transmit and we innovate. We draw on the accumulated practices, tools, and hard-won wisdom of those who navigated the world before us and we add our own twists as we respond to the particularities of our world today. This is the engine of life: Transmission and Innovation. It’s the heart of the dance.

I study how this dance happens — what makes it go well, what blocks it, what it looks like at the scale of a single conversation, a human life, an institution, and across generations. My primary field is Jewish education, where these questions are unusually vivid: communities navigating change and continuity, individuals trying to locate themselves within a tradition that is also always being remade. But the same dynamics show up in literary canons and fan fiction, in organizational life, and in the way scientific fields evolve and occasionally break open.

And I create spaces where people dance together — in classrooms, in workshops, in the theater and games I make. The goal is the same across all of it: to expand the resources available to the people in the room, and to create conditions where their own contributions — their experience, their questions, their particular way of moving — contribute to our shared ability to respond to the world. People experience this as belonging.

I hold a PhD in Anthropology of Education from Stanford University, an MA in Instructional Technology and Media from Columbia Teachers College, and a BA in Theater Studies from Yale. I teach, research, and create in Minneapolis, MN, ancestral land of the Dakota and the Anishinaabe. I was born and raised in Brazil; There’s something of the dance in the air I breathed as a kid…