About Us

Dr. Eliyana Adler is an historian of the modern Jewish experience in Eastern Europe with particular interests in the history of education, religion, gender studies, Holocaust historiography and memory. Her first book, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (2011) traced the emergence and development of formal schooling for Jewish girls in pre-revolutionary Russia. More recently, she published Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (2020), about the experiences and memory of a large group of Polish Jews who spent WWII in the unoccupied regions of the USSR. At present, Adler is researching memorial books as well as working on other related projects.

Dr. Danielle Butville, education program specialist, is a former classroom teacher whose work explores inquiry as a stance and as pedagogy in K-12 classrooms. Her current research examines practitioner inquiry and its impacts on preservice teachers’ dispositions and stance towards teaching once they enter the classroom. To the Initiative Butville contributes expertise in the integration of school curricula with students’ curiosities to create inquiry communities in classrooms. In recognition of her student-centered scholarship, Butville was recently awarded a grant from the Conference on English Educators (CEE) and the James Moffett Memorial Award by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Boaz Dvir directs the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State. He served as operations manager at the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning, which provides professional development to educators in several states. An award-winning filmmaker, Dvir tells the stories of ordinary people who transform into trailblazers. They include an inner-city schoolteacher who emerges as a disruptive innovator and a national model (Discovering Gloria); a World War II flight engineer who transforms into the leader of a secret operation to prevent a second Holocaust (A Wing and a Prayer); a truck driver who becomes an effective child-protection activist (Jessie’s Dad); and a Holocaust survivor who sets out to kill his father’s Nazi executioner (Cojot).

Dr. Russell Frank worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in California and Pennsylvania for 13 years before joining the journalism faculty of the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. A folklorist by training (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), Frank’s primary interest is in the telling of true stories, orally and in writing. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar, in Ukraine in 2012-13, and in Greece in 2019-20. During his time in Greece, he was researching the lives of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa until the COVID pandemic forced his early departure.

Elham Hajesmaeili is an artist, researcher, and art educator in central Pennsylvania. She received a B.F.A. in Handicrafts from Shiraz University, Iran, in 2006, an M.A. in art studies from the University of Art, Tehran, Iran, in 2010, and an M.F.A. in Painting & Drawing from the Pennsylvania State University, U.S, in 2017. She has held multiple group and solo exhibitions in Iran and United States. Currently, she is a dual-titled Ph.D. candidate in art education and women’s, gender, & sexuality studies at Penn State. Her teaching experiences in two geographical contexts shape her understanding of feminist pedagogy as a relational concept that must be acknowledged and practiced to make classrooms constructive environments where learning is a mutually rewarding experience.

Jin Han is a Ph.D. student in curriculum & instruction with an emphasis in language, culture, and society and in comparative and international education with an emphasis in gender and identity. She earned a master’s degree in translation and interpretation and a second master’s in humanities and social thought. Her research interests include the use of language and cultural conceptualizations that underpin the learning and using of language. She is also interested in cultural and linguistic translation. Jin has conducted research about the translation of global feminism into local feminist activities and the dynamics of the exchange of local and global ideas. She is currently researching the intersection of identity, gender, and literacy practices of Chinese women.

Dr. Kathleen Hill, associate professor of science education, is a former environmental scientist, and science teacher who currently works with scientists and engineers to design and implement STEM education outreach programs that bridge cutting-edge science and engineering research and K-12 classrooms. She worked in environmental consulting for 10 years, which involved a wide variety of projects across the desert southwest region of the United States. She then transitioned to teaching middle and high school science and served as a teacher leader on the NASA Phoenix Student Internship Program as well as coordinator for a school-wide middle school science and engineering fair. Her research has focused on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and specialized content knowledge.

Guadalupe Kasper is the Liaison for the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State Berks. She is a faculty member in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education (EECE) Program, and she teaches courses in Education, Sociology, and Anthropology. Guadalupe is trained in Anthropology and has engaged in educational and ethnographic research around bilingual and family literacy and home and school community collaborations. She is an active member and mentor of the Social Justice Collaborative and the Antiracism Across the Curriculum Initiative. Both provide collaborative support for faculty teaching race and racism across all disciplines and for students in their own inquiry around matters of social justice. Guadalupe is the lead administrator for the Penn State Berks Educational Partnership Program (PEPP). PEPP is a college preparatory partnership program that combines academic, career, and social support for high school students in the Reading School District. She belongs to and supports a number of campus-wide initiatives around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, including campus community engagement and local service-learning initiatives. Guadalupe also teaches part-time as an Adult ESL Instructor for the Literacy Council of Reading and Berks County and serves as a school board member in the Wilson School District.

Dr. Tiyanjana Maluwa is the H. Laddie Montague Chair in Law. He previously worked as the legal counsel of the OAU (now African Union) and, subsequently, as the legal adviser to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Prior to joining the AU, he was Professor of Law at the University of Cape Town, and Extraordinary Professor of Law at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Professor Maluwa served as the inaugural director of the Penn State School of International Affairs from 2007 to 2015. In 2017, he was a Senior Fellow at the Kolleg-Forschegruppe (KFG) based at Humboldt University, Berlin. In August 2021, he was elected a member of the Institute of International Law. He holds a Ph.D. degree in International Law from the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Scott Alan Metzger is an associate professor of social studies education at Penn State and a scholar of history education. He was a high-school teacher before earning his Ph.D. from Michigan State University and now works with undergraduate and graduate students in secondary (7-12) social-studies teacher certification and courses on history and social studies topics. With research expertise in history teaching, learning and curriculum, Dr. Metzger’s work focuses on what and how people learn and think about the past, including media/technology and classroom discussion of social and historical difficult topics.

Dr. Ashley Patterson is an associate professor of education with expertise in equity and diversity. Dr. Patterson’s work in the educational field began as an elementary level inclusive special educator. She is committed to preparing educators who take up a critical lens to working with children and best serving their needs while seeking ways to deconstruct inequities woven into the US’s existing public school system and structure. Broadly, Dr. Patterson’s research interests consider intersections between identity and education, considering the dialogic relationship that exists as the ways we think about ourselves impact our educational experiences while our educational experiences impact the ways we think about ourselves. Employing an intersectional approach to considering identity, Dr. Patterson’s research examines race conjointly with a host of other contextually important and influential identity markers.

Dr. Logan Rutten, education program specialist, is a teacher educator whose research examines practitioner inquiry as a form of professional learning for educators across the career span and particularly within school-university partnerships such as professional development schools. In recognition of his contributions to teacher education, Dr. Rutten was recently awarded the Robert E. Stevenson Memorial Scholarship by the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) and the Arthur Blumberg/Edward Pajak Memorial Scholarship by the Council of Professors of Instructional Supervision (COPIS). Dr. Rutten currently serves as Associate Editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Research, Policy, and Practice in School-University Partnerships and as Co-Chair of Communications for the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS).

Stacy Sterndale, education program specialist, is a former classroom teacher in secondary biological science and environmental science. Stacy earned her B.S. in Environmental Science from Albright College in 2011 and interned with the School for Field Studies in wildlife management. She earned her teaching certification from Juniata College in 2014. Her areas of educational interest are designing and facilitating experiential learning, cultivating student autonomy through flipped classroom approaches, and creating collaborative classroom communities through inquiry. Stacy coordinated a professional learning community inquiry with fellow faculty members to explore the value of blending learning approaches for secondary students. She has presented at the Pennsylvania Science Teachers Association conference and has studied and worked in Brazil, Canada, Australia, and Kenya. Currently, Stacy is working towards a master’s degree in biological sciences with Clemson University.