Through the research project, the Humanities Reimagined Project, Professor Snyder curates curriculum developed in Brown Summer High School's English classrooms as well as creates new curriculum in a publicly accessible format that is classroom-ready for teachers. The materials integrate literary and adolescent fiction with primary sources and multi-genre texts to create units of study for high school students that center student identity, ask questions about power and justice, and provide avenues to study or imagine resistance, agency, and critical hope. She works closely with undergraduate researchers, curators at the John Hay Library special collections, and teachers around the country to put together curriculum about books that students want to read. Some of the recent books featured by the project include: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Internment by Samira Ahmed, and Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacquelyn Woodson.

Humanities Reimagined: Curriculum Development in Context

Professor Snyder advises and mentors undergraduates as part of the Brown University Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRA) Program. Over the past five years, she has mentored over twenty UTRA students who have worked on the Humanities Reimagined Project.

Brown Summer High School (BSHS) is a professional development and summer enrichment program with a student-centered environment where Brown MAT students, local teachers, and hundreds of young people advance their knowledge and skills and build a pop-up learning community every summer. It is a space where Professor Snyder creates engaging and innovative curriculum and focuses on advancing the education and college going interests of the diverse group of low-income students who attend. As the Faculty Director of Brown Summer High School for eighteen years, Professor Snyder's administrative work at Brown enriches her work with lcoal partner schools and vice versa. In surveys, BSHS students report that they feel a sense of belonging to the BSHS community and that it increases their interest in and awareness of college opportunities. The 100-200 students who come to BSHS each summer hail from Providence, Central Falls and the surrounding community to take two engaging courses with MAT student teachers. For over 50 years, BSHS has maintained its role as a valuable outreach program of Brown University with an engaging, innovative classroom experience and as a free, open access, college preparatory programming for generations of adolescents in the greater Providence area.

Professor Snyder is an active leader and collaborative participant in university, professional, and community organizations. Her commitments include a focus on shared governance, advising, pedagogical development for university faculty, and engaged scholarship and teaching.

As a long time member of NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English, she has presented research and curriculum development work with university colleagues, teachers, and most recently high school students. She encourages teachers to become involved in professional organizations and in research by acting as a mentor with The Future is Now, a group that fosters research skills, professional association membership, and connections among beginning educators.

Professor Snyder collaborates with teacher educators through organizing and presenting in fall and spring conferences through CETE, an association of teacher education programs in highly selective liberal arts institutions in the Northeast that advocates for students at liberal arts colleges to become public secondary school educators. In the community, she is a trustee on their governing board and a leader for the Education Committee and the Committee on Trusteeship and Governance of the Paul Cuffee Maritime Charter School.

University Afffiliations:

• Advisor to students in the Presidential Scholar's Program
• Member of the University Resources Committee
• Faculty Director of Brown Summer High School
• Swearer Center for Public Service Faculty Affiliate
• The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Affiliate

Professional Affiliations:

• CETE: Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education (website currently hosted at Swarthmore College)
• NCTE ELATE English Language Arts Teacher Educators Member
• NCTE Member

Community Affiliations:

• Paul Cuffee School Trustee

Professor Snyder aims to create engaging and innovative curricula around diverse topics and texts for her own classes and to teach her students to do the same. Her goals as a teacher educator are to build student teachers' skills and confidence with core practices in the English classroom from modeling, to dialogue and discussion, to textual analysis and argument writing. Professor Snyder's classroom for aspiring English teachers creates a rich dialogue about stories, poetry, essays and the world around us. Because literature and non-fiction will be the center of English teachers' future classrooms, Professor Snyder centers those texts in her classroom and focuses on the ways that texts inform perspective, spur argument and questioning, and provide space for discussion. As students explore methods of teaching English, they use shared texts to ground the practices and make them realistic and not theoretical and distant. In all of her workshop based courses, Professor Snyder models practices that the candidates will use in their teaching and anchors those practices to a philosophy of student centered and dialogic learning. Her goals are to create robust, engaging, authentic learning experiences that captivate the intellect and imagination of teachers and students.

Professor Snyder is committed to supporting students’ personal and academic journeys at and beyond Brown. As a freshmen and sophomore advisor, a concentration advisor to students pursuing Education Studies, and an advisor to undergraduates who have been admitted to the English BAC/MAT Program, she advises between 15-20 undergraduates and 5-12 graduate students each year. She advises students in the Presidential Scholar's Program and transfer students. Advising and mentoring are a focal component of her teaching practice. She continues to support alumni through alumni office hours, online conferences, doctoral program advising and career progression advising.