Contact Information

• mkeiser@unca.edu
• 5025
• 122 Zageir Hall

Dr. Megan M Keiser is an Assistant Professor of Education at UNC Asheville preparing future teachers by adding to their “tool boxes” with experiential teaching tools. A passionate equity seeking liberal arts educator she took a circuitous route to the public school classroom. After graduating with an Economics degree from Guilford College, she worked on a garlic farm in Italy with developmentally differently-abled community members, served a Peer Mediation Coordinator in Washington DC public schools, and became an interim adaptive PE teacher in Salt Lake public schools. These transformative cross cultural experiences helped her realize she wanted to be a licensed public school educator. After receiving her licensure through UNCA’s post-bac program, she taught in Chapel Hill - Carrboro City Schools, earned National Board certification, and returned to teach in Asheville City Schools, earning District Teacher of the Year. Connecting her public school students to engaging, experiential learning, her class visited barrier islands, created classroom newspapers, cooked with fraction math, wrote plays, and interviewed members of different religious groups. Dr. Keiser served as Asheville City School’s first literacy coach, coaching to adult learners. Dr. Keiser completed her doctorate focused on the landscape of reading curricula and literacy coaches in North Carolina. She then taught at Brevard College’s Teacher Education program for twelve years, winning the Exemplary Teaching award. 

As a teacher of teachers, Dr. Keiser sparks a joy of learning by embedding experiential, community based learning such as economics of fair trade chocolate, monarch butterflies, and immigrant investigations into her methods courses. She connects candidates to community based partnerships through field trips, service learning, and expert panels to prepare future teachers to know how and where to advocate for their future students. Additionally, as a trained Resilience Educator, she embeds wellness, self-regulation, and mindfulness tools into her college classroom. She is also a member of NC’s Public School Forum’s Education Preparation Programs Trauma-Informed Task Force. She most recently served on NC Independent College and Universities’ State Task Force to embed Science of Reading into education preparation programs’ reading curricula. Dr. Keiser’s area of research includes the use of experiential practices to address equity, vocabulary development and phonological awareness. Her sabbatical focused on wellness practices and examination of tools to support school personnel to be more resilient and create positive learning communities.