Meet the Faculty

Project Co-Directors

Elisabeth Nevins, M.S.Ed.

Principal
Seed Education Consulting
enevins@seed-ed.com | www.seed-ed.com

Elisabeth Nevins is a museum education, interpretation, and evaluation consultant based in Boston, Massachusetts. She collaborates with staff at museums and historic sites throughout the Northeast to create empowering and engaging learning experiences with their visitors. Nevins serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Museum Education and recently co-edited three issues. Her essay “The Past as a Brave Space: Reframing Relevance” was published in The State of Museums: Voices from the Field from MuseumsEtc in fall 2018. She holds a B.A. in history from Yale University and an M.S.Ed. in museum education and early adolescent education from Bank Street Graduate School of Education.

Project Faculty

Hilary Goodnow

Associate Director of Education & Outreach
Plimoth Patuxet Museums
plimoth.org

Hilary Goodnow is the Associate Director of Education & Outreach at Plimoth Patuxet Museums (formerly Plimoth Plantation). She is a Public Historian specializing in engaging, immersive, and thought-provoking historic and cultural exhibits, programs, and living history experiences for diverse audiences. She holds an MA in Public History from North Carolina State University and a BA in History and Museum Studies from Connecticut College.

Paul J. Grant-Costa, Ph.D., J.D.

Co-Director, Executive Editor
Native Northeast Research Collaborative
thenativenortheast.org

Paul J. Grant-Costa, Ph.D., J.D., is Co-Director and Executive Editor of the Native Northeast Research Collaborative (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project). He has worked as Senior Researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center. As a lead historical researcher on a number of federal recognition projects, he worked with tribal councils, tribal historians, lawyers, and anthropologists across New England. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Linguistics from the Univ. of Connecticut, a J.D. from the Univ. of Connecticut School of Law, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Elizabeth James-Perry

Multi-medium Artist
Aquinnah Wampanoag
elizabethjamesperry.com

Elizabeth James-Perry is an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head -Aquinnah, located by the richly colored clay cliffs of Marthas Vineyard/Noepe. She is a multi-medium traditional and contemporary artist taught by her mother Patricia James-Perry, and by cousins Dr. Helen Attaquin and Nanepashemut whose knowledge and artistry was crucial to the development of the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation Museum in the early 1970s. The artist's formal education includes training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Shoals Marine Lab; she holds a degree in Marine Biology from the University of Massachusetts, and was employed in fisheries research for several years. Additionally, she has conducted years of in-depth research at museum archives and collections in the United States and Europe. Awards include ribbons in the Textile & Jewelry Divisions at the annual Heard Museum Art Market, a Traditional Arts Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her wampum and twined basketry, and the Rebecca Blunk Award for her dedication to Northeastern arts.

Garrett Dash Nelson

Curator of Maps & Director of Geographic Scholarship
Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center
people.matinic.us/garrett/

Garrett Dash Nelson is a historical geographer and the Curator of Maps & Director of Geographic Scholarship at the Leventhal Map & Education Center. He works on the relationship between landscape, community, politics, and geographic representation. He holds an MA in Landscape & Culture from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Emily Scheinberg

Head of School Programs and Teacher Resources
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
mfa.org

Emily Scheinberg is Head of School Programs and Teacher Resources at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She particularly enjoys leading professional development programs focused on teaching with art and/or primary sources​, and has done so in various roles over the last 15 years. Emily previously worked in education at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); the Jewish Women's Archive (online, based in Brookline, MA), and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA), and in 2015 was recognized as Eastern Region Art Museum Educator of the Year by the National Art Education Association.

Dr. Sarah B. Shear

Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Multicultural Education
University of Washington-Bothell
uwb.edu/education

Dr. Shear earned her doctorate in Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum from the University of Missouri in 2014 with concentrations in social studies education and Indigenous Studies. Sarah examines K-12 social studies curriculum within Indigenous contexts, as well as race/ism and settler colonialism in K-12 social studies teacher education, popular media, and qualitative methodologies. As a member of the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective, Sarah is committed to collective action to combat oppression in education and academia. In addition, Sarah co-edited (Re)Imagining Elementary Social Studies: A Controversial Issues Reader (Information Age Press, 2018) and Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies Education (Information Age Press, in press). Her efforts have been featured by Zinn Project, Teaching Tolerance, and Huffington Post. Sarah is also a co-founding member of the Elementary Social Studies Education Summit and the forthcoming open-peer reviewed, open access journal The Critical Social Educator.

endawnis Spears

Co-Founder
Akomawt Educational Initiative
akomawt.org

endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is impassioned about the diverse and complex intersections of Native American narratives and museums. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Denver and will complete her Master’s degree also in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst next year. endawnis has worked for the Heard Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, the Narragansett Indian Tribe and was a Peabody Essex Museum Native American Arts and Culture Fellow. In late 2019, she was elected to the Federation of State Humanities Councils' Board of Directors. The federation is a national organization partnering all state humanities councils and supporting grassroots humanities programming in every state and territory. She is the Director of Outreach and Programming and founding member of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, an Indigenous education support service and interpretive consultancy. Originally from Camp Verde, Arizona, she lives in Rhode Island with her husband Cassius Spears Jr., and their four children, Nizhoni, Sowaniu, Giizhig, and Tishominko.

Timothy Turner

Associate Director of Indigenous Education
Plimoth Patuxet Museums
plimoth.org

Timothy Turner is from the Cherokee Nation. Tim began his career at Plimoth Patuxet Museums in 1987 and is currently the Associate Director of Indigenous Education. When Tim is not engaging guests at the Museum or on the road doing outreach programs, you may see Tim embodying Hobbamock, a Wampanoag pnise and advisor to Ousamequin (known to history by his title, Massasoit) sent to live outside the English village with his family in the 1620s. In 2017, Tim was honored with the Hornblower Award for outstanding contribution to the spirit of Plimoth Patuxet's founder, Henry Hornblower II.

Margaret Wickens Pearce, Ph.D.

Studio 1:1 LLC, Rockland, ME
Faculty Associate, University of Maine
studio1to1.net

Margaret Pearce is enrolled Citizen Band Potawatomi and a cartographer based in Rockland, Maine. She holds a PhD in Geography from Clark University (where she focused on map history and cartographic design), and has sixteen years of experience as a geography faculty member, most recently as Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas (where she also taught in the Indigenous Studies Program). In 2016, she decided to devote herself full-time to map design, especially for Indigenous geographies. Her awards include a Yaddo Fellowship, an Anne Ray Fellowship (School for Advanced Research), an ACLS Fellowship, an APS Franklin Research Grant, a Landes Research Grant, and two national map design awards. She is former president of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). She is omnivorous in her passion for maps.

Project Lead Teacher

Christine Baron

Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Education
Teachers College, Columbia University
columbia.edu

Christine Baron is a former high school history teacher and museum educator. Prior to her academic post, Dr. Baron directed the development of educational and interpretation programs at the Old North Church, Boston. Dr. Baron’s research focuses on using museums and historic sites as laboratories for history teacher education. Her related interests include examining historical thinking related to non-traditional texts (buildings, images and artifacts), teaching and teacher learning in informal settings. She has been recognized by the National Council on Public History American Association of State and Local History, and the National Council on the Social Studies her research related to using historic sites to foster historical thinking.