Dr. Lora Hawkins joined the App State English Department in the fall of 2024 as a tenure-track professor in the secondary education degree program. Lora loves the community she has found in Boone, in both her students and colleagues. She enjoys going to class every day to be with her students because they are always engaged, thoughtful, and excited to learn. Though she doesn’t live in Boone, she loves the beautiful view of the mountains she can see from her office. Lora enjoys doing DIY projects in her spare time. She is always building things like swings, pergolas, and more. Lora also enjoys going hiking and gardening vegetables, and wildflowers. Every year, she plants either a berry bush or a fruit tree in hopes that one day, kids will be able to eat their way around her lawn.
Lora obtained her PhD at Columbia University’s Teacher College. Her dissertation started with taking a group of students and thinking about culturally sustaining pedagogy in an international school. This meant that in one classroom, you would have a variety of different ethnicities represented. They wanted to find a way to make it culturally sustainable, so the students made an alternative model of school, while still keeping the usual content standards. The model had to be interdisciplinary and include a component that extended beyond school. The students had to decode a primary text source, build models, and set basic postulates and geometry. Lora said it was interesting to see the growth in the students.
Her current academic interests lie in supporting school participants who are in marginalized communities. Lora was originally supposed to go teach in Kazakhstan, but ended up buying a one-way ticket to Bogota, Colombia. She found a job in Peru, where she kept meeting these amazing individuals who constantly showed her help while she was in a place she knew nothing about. Lora said in our interview that these experiences helped form how she wanted to treat people. She loves getting to be the best support she can be for them in school and in the classroom. She is currently working on a research project with Dr. Lucy Arnold at the University of Charlotte. The research project includes looking at queer, trans, and non-binary teachers’ experiences in the classroom and figuring out ways to better support them. Lora is also working with a group of students who were looking at books being banned. They realized that most of the banned books were either by queer and BIPOC people or about queer people and they created a banned book club project. They received a grant from the state to create a curriculum and classroom libraries that all feature banned books.
Lora currently teaches supervised student teachers and applied grammar and language principles classes. Lora believes you can’t separate the head and the heart. She tries to be relationship-driven and playful in the classroom. Application is also a big part of her classroom environment. She emphasizes the when, where, and how you can use something you learn in the classroom in your profession. Her favorite part about teaching here is the overwhelming support and joy she feels from her colleagues and students.
Written by Jacey Widner
Headshot of Lora Hawkins
Headshot of Lora Hawkins