Kira brings nearly two decades of academic leadership — running a $6.8M literacy organization, designing fellowship programs, securing $10M+ in funding — together with a research specialty most consultants don't have: mapping the actual relationships inside an organization and showing where they help, and where they quietly don't.
60–90 minute keynotes on teacher networks, connected learning, racial justice in teacher activism, and humanizing professional development. Past venues include AERA, ISLS, and the Connected Learning Summit.
Multi-day teacher and leader institutes, modeled on the Transformative Teacher Educator Fellowship Kira founded and directed — a week-long summer institute plus monthly follow-up sessions.
Design-based and mixed-methods evaluation for teacher pipeline programs, family literacy initiatives, and community education partnerships, with experience reporting to state education departments and foundations.
A structured SNA engagement — surveying staff or program participants, mapping the resulting network with UCINET or Gephi, and translating the map into a plain-language report on where collaboration, isolation, or unequal access are happening.
Designing PD sequences, certificate programs, and graduate curricula that build relationships as deliberately as they build content knowledge — drawing on the "critical network literacy" framework.
Support developing research-backed proposals for city, state, and foundation funders — from initial concept through final report, drawing on a track record that includes seven-figure city contracts.
Manuscript and special-issue editorial support for journals and edited volumes, drawing on experience as Editor-in-Chief of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies and as a long-standing reviewer for Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and others.
Mentoring for doctoral students and early-career faculty on qualitative methods, network analysis, and academic writing, informed by her role co-coordinating UIC's Language, Literacies & Culture doctoral program.
Experience designing and delivering programming abroad (Spain, Taiwan) and bilingual family programming in the U.S., for organizations working across language and cultural contexts.
Including multi-year program evaluation for the Pennsylvania Department of Education's Accelerated Teacher Certificate program.
Principal Investigator on more than a dozen City of Chicago-funded family and community engagement initiatives, totaling well over $10 million.
Visiting and collaborative work with the Universidad de Sevilla, Temple University, and Drexel University, among others.
Professional development design for a 60-teacher cohort at the Taipei American School on interdisciplinary writing instruction.
Grant-funded partnerships with the Spencer Foundation, Donley Foundation, and McCormick Foundation, among others.
Consulting on service-learning and STEM collaboration design for organizations including Need-in-Deed and the Philadelphia Education Fund.