I am a former classroom teacher at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, who returned to graduate studies compelled by John Dewey’s (1938) assertion that within aesthetic experience is a learning approach and direction. Throughout my career, scholarly and professional activities have been primarily concerned with how the aesthetics of human understanding (understood as attention to meaning-making processes) merit serious consideration as pragmatic and philosophical necessities within teaching/learning situations of all kinds. The impacts of my scholarship are found within the documented relationships across the aesthetic with co-curricular-making—attending to qualities and differences in understandings, formative assessment, student thought processes, teacher planning processes, contextual and physical space considerations, ethics that connect thinking and doing, and implications for teacher education and professional development. My recent research has explored curricular kinships found within long-held beliefs and modes of being that Indigenous wisdom traditions embody, offering the needed learning conditions, supports and participation towards (un)decolonizing curricular efforts. Thus, curricular enactment invested within the aesthetics of human understandings offers an (un)decolonizing philosophical and pragmatic approach to teaching and learning of all kinds, striving for connections across disciplines, demanding continuous engagement in reflection and deliberation, and honoring teaching and learning as complex, relational, and developmental in nature. Beyond my K-12 teaching years, I was a Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2000-2012, holding an Endowed Chair in mentorship. And, from 2013-2026, a Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. At UBC Okanagan, I also held leadership roles as the Director of the Okanagan School of Education (2018-24), Director of Graduate Studies in Education (2013-2018), and Director of Centre for Mindful Engagement (2014-16). Throughout my life-long career as an educator, I enlarged and deepened personal/professional commitment to the primacy of teachers in the lives of their students and the long-term impact on the future, contributing to the scholarship regarding school curriculum, teacher education, and professional development reform initiatives. Research Interests: Fostering Pedagogical Relationships, Seeing and Acting on Innovation’s Renewing Potential—The Fecundity of Genuine Learning Contexts, Curriculum as Lived in Classrooms, Teacher Education and Professional Development Reform Efforts, (Un)Decolonizing Curricular and Programmatic Efforts.