From classroom teacher to network scientist of education.
Kira began as a kindergarten teacher in Philadelphia and an AmeriCorps educator working in community health and food justice. That ground-level view of how teachers survive — or don't — is still the engine behind her research nearly three decades later. She went on to pioneer critical social network analysis, a methodology that maps the relationships sustaining (or failing) educators, and has spent her career translating that map into programs, books, and policy that actually change outcomes for teachers and the communities they serve.
Her work sits at the intersection of relationships, social technologies, and educational equity. She is equally at home tracing the informal networks that sustain teachers of color in hostile school climates and analyzing how educators use Twitter, social annotation platforms, and other connected technologies to organize, collaborate, and learn across distances.
She currently co-coordinates the Language, Literacies & Culture doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is a tenured Associate Professor. She previously directed the UIC Center for Literacy, a $6.8M family-literacy organization serving 5,000 Chicago families annually, and held the endowed Rosemary & Walter Blankley Professorship at Arcadia University.