Stefanie Bator

Dr. Stefanie Bator, humanities teacher, comes to Siena with eighteen years of teaching experience. She earned her Ph.D. in American history (with a specialization in U.S. foreign policy and gender studies) from Northwestern University in 2012, learning Tagalog and backpacking through the Philippines for her dissertation. She began high school teaching after that and has never looked back. Dr. Bator believes that learning how to ask the strongest question, rather than memorizing rote answers, is what gives humans the power to change the world in ways both big and small. As such, her greatest joy comes from helping every student acquire the skills they need to ask, then answer, their own questions about the world. Most recently, she became a specialist in teaching neurodivergent students with learning differences. Her current research asks how high school and middle school history teachers can create multimodal reading curricula that foster and develop discipline-specific reading skills for students with reading differences such as dyslexia. She came to Siena to both share her curricular developments with Siena students and to learn from the school’s expert faculty to further develop this pedagogy. In her classroom she seeks to model how students with learning differences can use their brain’s unique strengths to climb over obstacles, tackle challenging academic tasks, and confidently ask: why, how, and why not? When not in the classroom, Dr. Bator is a prolific knitter and sewist, impassioned backyard-kitchen gardener, ardent murder mystery reader, and a Premier League aficionado.

Why I Teach at Siena: I want to be a part of a community in which educators collaborate to combine a strengths-based approach with the latest neuroscientific research to help young people with learning differences understand just how brilliant they are; Siena is that place!