Kersti Tyson, PhD

Kersti believes that the purpose of education is to nurture our individual and collective potential. With a deep commitment to the role public education has in a democratic society, she is also passionate about pursuing an ever evolving understanding of what makes learning work.

As a learning scientist, Kersti learns about learning in order to support the brave work teachers do to educate their students. Kersti draws from multiple fields to inform her work in education, philosophy, history, sociology, human development, mathematics, psychology, ecology — and the learning sciences. She understands learning as an interdisciplinary phenomena that, at its heart, is both disruptive and transformative; recognizing that learning is a social process that humans do based on the opportunities to which we have access. She understands teaching as a listening profession, believing that the work of teaching is most about listening in responsible and responsive to students for their ways of knowing and making knowledge their own through sense-making with others, especially when it comes to learning mathematics!

Kersti’s heart work is supporting the students, families and educators of Northern NM to thrive as they sustain their cultures, languages, and ways of being in the 21st Century. As a mathematics educator, she works to heal people’s relationships with mathematics, so that they can come to be the mathematicians that they are. She is as interested in what we need to unlearn, as she is in what we need to learn, in order to ensure the interactions children experience with educators in schools are joyful, educative and sustaining; and that these experiences prepare them to fully participate in our local/global society in the 21st Century.

Kersti graduated from Taos High School. She earned her bachelor’s in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, her teaching certificate from the UNM/SFPS Teaching Internship Program, her master’s in intercultural communication from the University of New Mexico, and her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from the University of Washington. She earned tenure at the University of New Mexico and has taught in teacher education programs throughout Northern New Mexico. She lives in Taos, NM on a farm with her son, her husband, their dogs and some sheep and chickens.

At SWC, she is excited to teach and learn alongside educators in a program that attends to nurturing professional and human development as a means for pursing transformative education.