Dr. Kristian Stewart, a University of Michigan Diversity Scholar and King Chávez Park Future Faculty Fellow, holds a joint appointment in both the departments of Language, Culture, and Communication and the College of Education at the University of Michigan Dearborn, USA. Courses she has instructed include writing and rhetoric I and II, developmental writing, advanced argumentation, theme-based writing, independent composition studies (South Africa themed), and business writing & rhetoric. In the College of Education, Dr. Stewart instructs scholarly writing, a graduate course geared toward both master’s and doctoral degree seeking students. Dr. Stewart has also taught ESL and EFL courses at the university and in k-12 systems in the USA, China, Italy, and Germany. In 2014, Dr. Stewart spent a semester in South Africa with teacher education students in order to investigate their digital storytelling and writing practices for her dissertation project. Dr. Stewart holds degrees in English Education (B.S.), Language Education (M.A.), and Curriculum and Practice (Ed.D).

Dr. Stewart is a digital storytelling & literacy practitioner. In this context she conducts research around digital storytelling and affective, humanizing literacy practices, which include methods to socialize diverse student populations and to decolonize the curriculum more broadly. Currently, Dr. Stewart has connected her American writing classroom with a cohort of South African map-makers in a semester-long project titled, “You Map My World; We Write Yours.”

Dr. Stewart has presented papers at The Conference on College Composition and Communication (4C), American Educational Research Association (AERA), the ICSAI conference series (Bangkok), Going Global (sponsored by The British Council), and at E-Learning, HELTASA, & ICED conferences in South Africa. In 2018, Dr. Stewart conducted a digital storytelling workshop for teachers at the Australian Association for the Teaching of English conference in Perth, Australia.

In 2016, Dr. Stewart developed and co-taught a cross-cultural and transcontinental course between her American writing students and South African teacher education students (published in the British Educational Journal of Technology). An additional article Dr. Stewart published in BJET examined digital storytelling as an act of representation, answering Brink’s (1998) call for creating a ‘new generation of writers’ in post-apartheid South Africa. Dr. Stewart (in 2017) published, “Classrooms as Safe Houses?: The Ethical and Emotional Implications of Digital Storytelling in the University Writing Classroom” and “How Can They Expect Us to be Humane: Yet, They Leave no Room for Humanity?” Cape Town Teachers Respond to the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS)” in 2019. Her chapter, “Restorying South Africa: A Digital Storytelling Praxis for Developing Historically Conscious Teachers” is currently in press with Routledge. Dr. Stewart also has a manuscript (with Gachago) in submission titled, “White Teachers and White Classroom Spaces: Privilege, the Colonial Wound, and Pedagogical Concerns” and a chapter accepted titled, “Response-able Digital Storytelling to Reimagine HE Classroom Practices.” Lastly, her solo project “#Resist: Educating Students through Glocal Literacy in the Times of Trump” is also in submission.