Cultivating Student Voice & Agency

After a decade as a newspaper reporter in Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa, Dane became a 6th grade writing teacher at a middle school on Denver's Northside. He and his students tackled social justice topics including undocumented student access to higher education, gentrification, and school-related gun protections while also scoring in the top 3 in Denver Public Schools state testing scores in writing growth.

After five years in the classroom, Dane moved to CU-Denver where he is a clinical assistant professor of education supporting teacher development through the ASPIRE to Teach program, the Curriculum & Instruction master's track, and the Student Voice and Leadership initiative through Denver Public Schools. He has been a member of the Critical Civic Inquiry research collective for a decade and is treasurer of the Action Research Network of the Americas.

His work earned him the 2022 CU-Denver campus-wide Service and Leadership award (IRC). Dane earned his PhD in 2022; his dissertation focuses on ideas of student voice, teacher agency, and sociopolitical development.