Nicole Mirra

Nicole Mirra is an Associate Professor of Education in UCLA’s Department of Education and Faculty Director of the UCLA Teacher Education Program (TEP). Her research utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to collaboratively create learning environments with teachers and youth that disrupt structures of social injustice and creatively compose liberatory futures. Her scholarship is animated by critical sociocultural theories of democracy, literacy, race, and pedagogy. In her work, she centers the counter-stories of communities positioned at the civic margins to support teachers in fostering empathetic, ethical, and vulnerable dialogue and action across lines of ideological and demographic difference. She partners with educators and youth in formal and informal learning settings to create educational interventions that dream new civic possibilities into existence while simultaneously combating the inequities embedded within current social arrangements. Her praxis innovates content methods pedagogy and field work in teacher education via the action principle that every teacher is a civics teacher oriented toward a more equitable society still on its way. She previously taught English Language Arts and debate in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California.