Emily Evanstein

UC Santa Barbara
ekbernstein@ucsb.edu

Emily Evanstein, MA, is a doctoral student studying Special Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also works as an instructor and supervisor for the Mild/Moderate Special Education credential in the Teacher Education Program at UCSB.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Emily taught special education at the elementary level in East San Jose and Santa Barbara, California. She has a Mild/Moderate Education Specialist Credential. During her time in the classroom, she mentored other teachers in the areas of Positive Behavior Intervention, and Technology Integration. Leaving the classroom was a difficult decision, but ultimately she felt that in order to broaden her impact on students, she needed to take the knowledge she had gained from the classroom and use it to help educate future teachers. 

Emily was lucky to spend time during her first few years at UCSB assisting on a project that investigated training intended to improve special education teachers’ ability to engage parents in IEP meetings. Based on her experiences in the classroom, she has become curious about if and how general education and special education teachers could be taught to collaborate more fully. She is investigating this topic in her dissertation research.

Emily has spent time working within the CTERIN hub at UCSB and views the Network not just as a set of research aims, but as a reassurance that there are people in academia all across this state who value teaching and want to make a change for the better; she hopes to be part of that change.