Rosette Cirillo

Rosette Cirillo is a lecturer on education and a member of the core faculty for the Teaching and Teacher Leadership program. As a teacher educator, she believes teachers must be reflective, inclusive, and deeply aware of the historical, cultural, and social conditions of schooling. She is passionate about fostering English language arts educators who constantly challenge themselves and their communities to develop ethical and equitable classroom literacy and discussion practices. Cirillo’s case-based and rehearsal-focused pedagogy calls on students to critically examine their values alongside their actions and dare to be aware of the roles they play in organizations to fight for change within them.

Cirillo develops unique hands-on workshops for facilitators and leaders hoping to reveal and shift the power dynamics in their communities. She has co-written a casebook on inclusion in higher education for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) Network.

Cirillo's current research explores the inner lives of teachers. By weaving together interviews with classroom teachers and philosophy, she considers how a teacher’s relationship to mortality impacts their pedagogy, classroom practices, and their thoughts on what it means to be a teacher in our current necro-political landscape. Her work draws on philosophy and education, group psychology, ethics, and storytelling traditions to showcase classroom teachers’ moral and ethical lives and create pathways for meaningful change in teacher education.

She has served as a board member for the Boston Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems (CSGSS) and is a current member of both CSGSS and A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems. She is a proud former Chelsea Public Schools teacher and first-generation scholar.