About Me
I’m Susan (she/her)
I live and work in the Pacific Northwest on Coast Salish lands (Duwamish, Suquamish, and Muckleshoot). I am a lover of rain, forests, water, travel, stories, and engaging my creativity in new ways.
I’m partner to Lex and mom to elementary-aged twins. We are a multiracial, neurodivergent, unschooling family whose self-directed learning approach prioritizes consent, autonomy, co-created knowledge, and justice-oriented critical inquiry.
With 20+ years of experience in education and mental health fields, I have seen the systemic barriers children and families face as they move through our institutions. I believe we are all in need of both individual and collective healing if we are interested in Growing Toward Liberation and a more inclusive world. My personal and professional philosophy is rooted in deep examination of our relationships with teaching, learning, the land, and each other to orient toward more humanizing and healing-centered spaces for all of us.
I’m a Lifelong Learner…
As a white, cis, able-bodied, American woman, I recognize that I hold multiple privileged identities that influence how I experience and move through the world. I do not call myself an expert on much of anything except my own personal identity and lived experience, my continuous learning and unlearning, and my own growth process as it is informed by all these intersections.
Children and young people remain some of my most important teachers. They have always been the ones who have had the most transformative impact on my understanding of what it means to learn, UNlearn, slow down, find joy, break cycles, speak truth, and co-create new realities together.
I value transparency and authenticity in the ways I am personally learning and growing alongside my community. I strive to listen more than I speak, to hold myself accountable for my own growth and healing as an intentional daily practice, and to learn out loud as I move through the world.
…and an Aspiring Co-Conspirator.
I am an aspiring co-conspirator for justice and collective liberation. I strive to weaponize my privilege to disrupt systems, policies, practices, and mindsets that lead to marginalization and oppression. I’m actively unlearning and healing from the ways white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, abelism, adultism and all other oppressive systems have shaped me.
By working with adults who raise and educate children (caregivers, educators, therapists, etc.), I hope to help us all interrogate the power dynamics that shape our relationships with each other, the systems that raised us, and the ones we want to disrupt as we reimagine and co-create a more accessible, inclusive, and liberated world. To do that, I believe our first step should be authentic learning from and decision-making with children toward divesting from the systems that harm us all.
My people are those who are willing to do the real work alongside me, who push me to dig deeper, and who hold me accountable for the ways I show up in the world.