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Abstract

This descriptive essay focuses on one teacher educator's response to a disrupted academic semester after a natural disaster that threatened to erode a service-learning designated interdisciplinary methods course for middle grades educators. This essay shares the process of pivoting to retain critical elements of the course. Reinforcing the use of resilience-informed pedagogy and modeling use of advisories, the instructor focused on developing a cohesive classroom community. Other aspects of the course revamp include offering differentiated service-learning opportunities. Centering teacher candidates’ joy and modeling best practices for middle level educators, the instructor describes project-based learning, a multidisciplinary literacy experience with a classroom novel about Syrian refugees, and role of impactful guest speakers to build future educators’ teaching toolboxes.

Author Bio

Dr. Megan M Keiser is a former public school classroom teacher, literacy coach, and now teacher educator.  First at Brevard College and now University of North Carolina at Asheville, she prepares future educators to harness the power of experiential learning and trauma-informed pedagogies. As a teacher of teachers, Dr. Keiser sparks a joy of learning by embedding experiential learning such as economics of fair trade chocolate, monarch butterflies, and immigrant investigations into her methods courses. She connects candidates to community based partnerships through field trips, service-learning, and expert panels to prepare future teachers to meet the NC Professional Teaching Standards. As a trained Resilience Educator, she embeds wellness, self-regulation, and mindfulness tools into her college classroom. She serves on NC’s Public School Forum’s Education Preparation Program’s Trauma-Informed Task Force. 

DOI

10.20429/cimle.2026.29202

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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