Shelby Astle is a Phd graduate in Applied Family Science at Kansas State University passionate about sex education, parent-child sexual communication, and public scholarship.

-- Relevate

Currently, Sarah Emanuels is working as the Teen Advocacy Program Coordinator at CASA of Johnson and Wyandotte Counties. In this position, she will be supporting volunteers as they serve as CASAs for teenagers in foster care. 

Previous to this, she worked as the Community Prevention Liaison at First Call. In this position, she worked alongside a coalition who received a mega-grant in their efforts to implement drug and alcohol prevention programming. She also served as a Family Services Counselor, managing and facilitating our Caring for Kids program, a psycho-educational program for kids and teens affected by SUD. She has her Masters in Applied Family Science from Kansas State University and her undergraduate degree in Family Studies.

-- LinkedIn

Professional Interests, Experience, and Expertise.

Complex trauma, self-compassion, sex education, sexual identity development, and dating and gendered violence treatment and prevention.

-- Relevate

Graduate Student Researcher at University of California Irvine (UCI)

Michelle Toews is the Associate Dean of Research and Scholarship in the College of Human Ecology at Kansas State University. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Science from The Ohio State University. Her main research interests include healthy adolescent relationships, relationship education, dating violence, violence prevention, and adolescent parents' co-parenting relationships. She has published and presented numerous papers in these areas. In addition, Dr. Toews has received over $11 million from the Administration for Children and Families to develop, implement, and evaluate relationship education programs for vulnerable youth. Prior to joining K-State, she taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses, including family relationships, family diversity, cultural diversity, working with families under stress, sexuality across the lifespan, family life education, and research methods to name a few.

-- Kansas State University

Prior to her current role, Yazedjian served as Associate Provost.  She joined Illinois State University in 2013 as Chair of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. As Chair, she led the transition from one to five degree programs in the department, developed the first accelerated master’s degree programs on campus, created a new online dietetic internship certificate, increased student enrollment, oversaw over $1 million dollars in equipment and facilities upgrades, and secured donor contributions for five new scholarships.

Before joining Illinois State University, Dr. Yazedjian was a faculty member in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at Texas State University. In 2010, she was appointed as Presidential Fellow where she served on the President’s Cabinet and focused on developing and implementing internationalization efforts across campus. After completing that assignment, she served as the Special Assistant to the Provost for International Student Services where she spearheaded a number of new internationalization initiatives aimed at improving and increasing the support services provided to international students. She also served as the Director for an annual workshop entitled Preparing Students for Socially Responsible Global Citizenship for faculty interested in integrating a global perspective into their courses and as the Associate Director, Global Curriculum Initiatives for the Multicultural Curriculum Transformation and Research Institute.

-- Western Michigan University

Dr. Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, where he serves as the Robert Quartermain Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education. Before arriving at UBC, Dr. Keenan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he also earned his PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education in 2019. Dr. Keenan completed his undergraduate studies at The New School in New York City, and earned a Master’s Degree from the Bank Street College of Education. He is a proud former New York City elementary school teacher.

Broadly, Dr. Keenan’s research analyzes how adults teach children to make sense of the social world. Much of his work investigates the management, or scripting, of children’s knowledge, and ways that educators and their students might work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different. Dr. Keenan is interested in those social issues that many adults find difficult to talk about with children – things like racism, gender, sexuality, and violence. He is perhaps best known for his 2017 article in the Harvard Educational Review, “Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy.”

Today, Dr. Keenan’s research projects center around two themes: 1.) the history and contemporary interaction of colonialism, racism, and gender in schools and 2.) the continued development of critical queer and trans pedagogies.

-- University of British Columbia