Biography

Melinda Russial

My curricular focus dwells in the interstices of educational phenomenology, global arts, and social justice. After seven years as Director of Arts and Culture, Director of Student Life Curriculum, Wellness Peer Education supervisor and IB Music and Theory of Knowledge teacher at the United World College-USA, I am now pursuing doctoral research in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. As an artist, my primary area of emphasis is in European orchestral clarinet and bass clarinet, with a secondary emphasis in Balkan and Middle Eastern music. I am currently exploring the rumblings of nascent poetry and the spaces between visual, aural, and literary mediums. I hold degrees in clarinet performance from Northwestern University (Bachelor of Music) and the University of Minnesota (Master of Music), and a Bachelor’s equivalent in Social Studies teaching. I am also working toward a Master of Arts degree in English at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. My teaching experience includes secondary and undergraduate global arts and humanities programs.

The confluence of experience at physical and psychological borders, experience that catalyzes personal transformations and sets the stage for larger systemic revolutions, has long occupied the core of my work. I am drawn to the prohibited and forbidden in education, to the mysteries that live in the hidden spaces of our porous intellectual boundaries. In a career that spans two decades of involvement in education and the arts, I have often found my fundamental orientation as an integrative thinker to be at odds with the traditional categories of reflection and practice that I have inherited. My praxis thrives in unfamiliar points of entry and divergent applications of knowledge across slippery and ever-changing ontological landscapes. In this current iteration of PhD study and research work, I again find myself compelled to embrace the borderlands of teaching and learning: I am interested in understanding what happens through, across, and around our learning spaces, what percolates in the between-spaces of established curricula, what happens when diverse educational paradigms and worldviews collide in the political realm of classrooms and alternative educational settings. Above all, I am interested in how our individual and shared identities are constructed and transformed as we encounter ourselves and each other in threshold states of being. I believe that a grounding in these questions can help us contend with the exigencies of our collective survival and teach towards world-preserving principles and global civic engagement.