Our Team
Emerging America comprises a network of leaders and teacher coaches who have long played a national role in service-learning, civic engagement, and access to history and social science for all learners. Emerging America team members have worked with local schools and districts, state agencies, colleges and universities, and community-based organizations across the U.S.
Rich Cairn, History, Civics and Social Studies Curriculum and Instructional Specialist
Rich Cairn, history, civics and social studies inclusion specialist for Emerging America, authored the groundbreaking Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Disability History Curriculum. He founded the Emerging America program in 2006 which has received support from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Teaching American History program. Cairn established the Accessing Inquiry program to support inclusive teaching of students with disabilities and of English Learners in social studies and humanities. Rich directed the 2018 Massachusetts Civics Education Institute for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. A graduate of Yale University, Rich earned a Master of Public Affairs from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. He is adjunct faculty for Westfield State University. He serves as Director of Programs on the board of the Disability History Association. He formerly served on the board of the Disability History Museum. He is a recognized national leader in service-learning, civic engagement, performance assessment, environmental education and history education–focused on access for ALL learners. He has authored numerous books, articles and multimedia, and has designed and led hundreds of teacher workshops and courses. He is a lifelong social justice activist.
Graham Warder, Consulting Scholar on Disability History
Graham Warder is an Emeritus Professor of History at Keene State College. He earned his B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in American Social and Cultural History from UMass Amherst. He leads the Teaching Disability History program of Keene State College funded by a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant. Since 1999, he has worked with the Disability History Museum, an online humanities resource providing primary sources and curriculum about the history of disability. He teaches in the Masters of History & Archives program at Keene State. His major research interests involve disability history and 19th-century America, including the American Civil War. Graham is the lead scholar on a Mass Humanities-supported project to research and develop a unit on disabled veterans of the Civil War. He serves as lead scholar on Emerging America's Reform to Equal Rights - K-12 Disability History Curriculum.
Kate Benson, Emerging America Library of Congress TPS Coach
Kate Benson is a former special education teacher and team chair, and she is a specialist in disability and institutional history. She is the author of a number of volumes on the history of asylums and state schools in Massachusetts as well as the president of the Belchertown State School Friends Association, a nonprofit organization devoted to maintaining the history of institutional care in New England. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, on New England Public Radio, and on numerous disability-focused websites. She provides educational and professional development opportunities to increase understanding of mental health care and special education through the lens of disability history. A graduate of the Elms College, she earned a Doctor of Education in Transformational School Leadership from Bay Path University. She is an expert on state school history, special education law, and inclusive education practices for individuals with disabilities. She serves on the Massachusetts Special Commission on State Institutions and is a member of the board of the Massachusetts History Alliance where she co-chairs its annual conference.
Alison Noyes, Contributor, Emerging America
Alison Noyes joined the Emerging America program at the Collaborative for Educational Services in 2018. She co-founded the English Learner Collaborations program of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies (MCSS) in partnership with Emerging America through a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grant. She has worked in the field of education for over 20 years, working for many years with international students and college study abroad as a program director and assistant dean before returning to focus on engaging K-12 students. Alison is a graduate of Haverford College and received graduate training in methods of teaching English as a Second Language at Harvard University while teaching in their intensive English summer program. She received a Master of Arts from Lesley University. She has worked on curriculum to engage students using theater arts techniques and developed projects incorporating local and site-based history resources into teachers’ classrooms. "Strengthen Language Proficiency Through Primary Source Inquiry: Supporting Multilingual Learners," a 2024 chapter, draws on the work with MCSS. Today she teaches English Language Learners and other students in an urban high school, and serves as a TPS Teachers Network regular contributor on behalf of MCSS and Emerging America.
Ross Newton, Emerging America Library of Congress TPS Coach
Ross Newton is a History Teacher at HEC Academy in Northampton, a special education public high school of the Collaborative for Educational Services (CES). Ross relates history to students’ lives through primary source inquiry and counternarratives about the agency and collective power of historically marginalized groups. He earned a B.A. from Hampshire College and a Ph.D. in History from Northeastern University and studied Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction at Boston University. Ross has published on topics in early American and public history and consulted for public history sites in Boston and Philadelphia. He has over a decade of teaching experience, sharing history with school groups and the general public at public history sites and working as an adjunct professor at Northeastern and LaSalle Universities. He taught high school history in Springfield, Massachusetts, supported students’ academics at a partial hospitalization program for adolescents in crisis, and created inquiry-based curricula for HEC students. He is a disability history consultant for Art-Reach Philadelphia. He contributes to Emerging America’s Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Disability Curriculum, and to CES workshops, conference panels, and graduate courses on teaching history to diverse students.
Saphire Murphy, Consulting Scholar on Disability and Disability History
Saphire Murphy, a Sociology and Education Inclusion Intern, is a community educator and scholar focused on disability representation. She is a graduate student at the University of Toledo in Ohio, pursuing dual degrees in Sociology and a Master’s in Liberal Studies. Her aspiration is to enhance her education by obtaining a graduate certificate in Qualitative Research and eventually enrolling in a PhD program in Sociology. Saphire earned her bachelor’s degree in Sociology with dual minors in Disability Studies and Women’s Studies. She applied her research during a summer internship in 2023 with the American Association for People with Disabilities (AAPD) and participated in the Fannie Lou Hamer Fellowship Program in the fall of the same year. Saphire witnessed firsthand the repercussions of not integrating disability history into the general curriculum, recalling the complaints voiced by teachers when she conducted her research and questioned why it is not included. She hopes to merge her passion for sociology and education, stressing the importance of uplifting disabled individuals who see the potential for change when social studies and history embrace inclusivity, rather than perpetuating the narrative that disabled people are only present in the traumatic aspects of history.
Catherine Glennon, Emerging America Library of Congress TPS Coach
Catherine has taught History and Social Studies since 2006 after completing her M.Ed at UMASS Amherst. She is teaching Civic Engagement in Any Subject: Integrating Local History Across the Curriculum in 2025. Catherine has been a teacher-leader with Emerging America since 2008, with the Disability History Museum, Windows on History, and civic engagement. Catherine is a creative and engaging educator who is passionate about continuing her own education to grow and improve classroom practice and student outcomes. She is certified by the Library of Congress and by the Western Massachusetts Writing Project to create and present workshops. Catherine has worked with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Project Zero (2023-24), MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in Civics Education (2020-4), and with the Woodrow Wilson foundation at Princeton University (2017). She has taught in very different school environments during her career – a suburban Catholic school, an urban charter school, a Vocational-Technical school, and currently in a regional rural high school. Her work focuses on the relevance and importance of local history and civic engagement.
Wendy Harris, Emerging America Library of Congress TPS Coach
Wendy Harris is passionate about teaching, social studies, and giving back to the community. She teaches at Metro Deaf School in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has been a classroom teacher for Deaf students of all ages since 2003 and currently splits her teaching duties between high school social studies and teaching braille and other skills to the school’s DeafBlind students ages 2-21. She grew up in Connecticut, earned a BA in American Studies with minors in African American Studies and Latin American Studies from Carleton College in Minnesota and her elementary credential and MA in Bilingual Deaf Education from the University of California, San Diego. Later, she added licenses in secondary social studies and as a teacher of the blind. She has participated in a number of programs including the Teacher for Global Classrooms program (Colombia), Fund for Teachers Fellowship (DeafBlind education in Tanzania and Kenya), National History Day Master Teacher Program, Minnesota Teacher Leadership Institute, and the National Center for the Humanities Teacher Advisory Council.
Laurie Risler, Emerging America Library of Congress TPS Coach
Laurie Risler is a former elementary school teacher. She is now on the faculty of Holyoke Community College after many years guiding future teachers at Westfield State College. With support from Emerging America, Laurie co-designed and produced a free K-5 inquiry-based “click and play” open source curriculum now available as "Private i History Detectives" from iCivics. She has co-led professional development programs in history for the Collaborative for Educational Services since 2011. She co-designed the course, Accessing Inquiry for Students with Disabilities through Primary Sources. She received the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies 2021 Barbara Capron Award for Excellence in Teaching Elementary Social Studies. She has been a history educator at local museums and archives. She earned her BA from Stonehill College and her MEd from Fitchburg State College.