Educator | Program Manager Adult Learning Practitioner
For nearly three decades, I've trained, coached, and led people across some very different worlds: military service, early childhood education, sales and hospitality, grant-funded youth programs, and now federal program management. What ties it together is a simple belief: learning happens whether we intend to teach or not. My job has always been to make sure the door is open when people get to the lesson.
This ePortfolio was built as part of my graduate work in Adult Learning and Development at Valdosta State University, and it brings together the theory behind that belief with the years of practice I've lived it through. Explore my background, my approach to access and adult education, and the work this program has helped me put into words.
What does it mean to teach adults? For me, the answer starts with a simple truth: learning happens whether we intend to teach or not. My job is to make sure the door is open when they get there.
This project explores my educational philosophy — the beliefs about learning and access that I have developed across years of work as a civilian training professional with the Department of the Air Force, and long before that, in classrooms with learners at every age and stage. It is grounded in adult learning theory and rooted in lived experience, including my own experience navigating learning environments as a neurodivergent learner and disability advocate.
Click below to read my full Educator Philosophy Statement, where I unpack what I believe, why I believe it, and what it looks like in practice.
Opening the door is only the first part of teaching. What happens once someone actually walks through it matters just as much. This piece looks at what happens when adults are asked to practice something instead of just hearing about it, and why that difference matters so much in fields like mine, where you often can't afford to get something wrong the first time it counts.
Drawing on theories from Kolb, Argyris and Schön, and situated learning, this component traces how real practice, not just checking a box or finishing a module, builds the kind of judgment that holds up under pressure. It draws on training I've built and delivered myself, from contingency contracting exercises to a communications activity inspired, oddly enough, by a viral video about a peanut butter sandwich.
The same idea holds well outside my own field too. Whether it's a leader learning to navigate conflict, a teacher shaping the next generation of early childhood educators, or a contracting officer learning to think on their feet in a bare-base environment, real learning happens in the doing, not just the telling.
This component examines Self-Directed Learning (SDL) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as two frameworks that, together, offer a more complete picture of what independent adult learning actually requires. SDL assumes learners already possess the executive capacity to plan, sequence, and evaluate their own progress, while SDT centers the psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, that sustain motivation once that structure exists. Neither theory alone accounts for what makes independent learning succeed or fail; together, they fill in each other's gaps.
For Self-Directed Learning, this component explores five strategies: a front-loaded plan, individualized task organization, diagnostic observation before design, self-designed checkpoints, and learning contracts. For Motivation and Self-Determination Theory, it explores barrier reduction and motivational redirection, body doubling and relatedness, self-advocacy through failure analysis, protecting generative tangents, and a praise-forward feedback structure. Each strategy is grounded in both current research and direct application to adult training environments, particularly military and government settings, where the gap between structure and motivation shows up often and matters.
These theories resonate personally as a neurodivergent adult learner and educator who has experienced firsthand the tension between needing flexibility and needing the motivation to actually use it. Structure and autonomy are not opposing forces to balance against one another, but two conditions that must be present together for genuine independent learning to occur.
Field Study
July 2026
Theories are easy to believe in a classroom. They get tested the moment you walk into a real one.
This project takes the ideas I have written about elsewhere in this portfolio —access, flexibility, meeting learners where they are—and holds them up against an actual adult learning program: the Communication B.A. at Indiana Institute of Technology. Drawing on conversations with an adjunct faculty member who has taught in the program since 2020, I looked at how a real institution balances consistency with flexibility, how accessibility gets built (or doesn't get built) into a standardized course shell, and what happens when the door I keep talking about is only partially open. Along the way, it became a story about me too — about catching my own blind spots as an educator, not just theirs. It is grounded in research, but it is really a story about what theory looks like once it meets people.