Educator. Scholar. Advocate. Social Entrepreneur.
From K-12 classrooms to carceral settings to college and university campuses. Everywhere education can reach, Lisette has been there.
M.S. Ed., Mercy University School of Education, Department of Early Childhood Education | EdD Candidate, Hofstra University School of Education, Department of Learning and Teaching | Yale School of Management, Executive Education, Women’s Leadership
With meticulous attention to the people others overlook and a commitment to education as liberation, Lisette creates spaces that inspire, elevate, and transform the lives of those who inhabit them.
Lisette began her career in early childhood and elementary classrooms in New York City, primarily in under-resourced communities in the Bronx and Brooklyn. She taught in inclusion classrooms serving students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and young people navigating complex life circumstances. What she learned there, that inclusive teaching requires culturally responsive materials, differentiated instruction, and a deep commitment to belonging, has shaped every role she has held since.
She went on to teach college courses inside correctional facilities across New York, including Taconic, Green Haven, Sing Sing, and Otisville, where she’s taught Sociology of Education, Structural Racism, History of Race, Introduction to Psychology, and Introduction to French to incarcerated students. In those classrooms, she encountered the long-term consequences of early educational failures and the extraordinary resilience of people who refused to be defined by them. That experience did not just inform her work. It became the center of it.
2024 to 2025, National Speaking Series
In 2024, Lisette launched The Restoration Tour: Voices of Women Rising After Incarceration, a national speaking series spotlighting the resilience, leadership, and educational advancement of women after incarceration. Through talks and workshops spanning correctional institutions, university classrooms, and national conferences, the tour elevates the voices of women whose lived experience is actively transforming the landscape of education and justice.
National Speaker
Voices of Women Rising After Incarceration
Teaching and Practice
Lisette approaches teaching as a scholar-practitioner who understands education as both a site of possibility and a site of responsibility. Her practice is grounded in culturally responsive teaching, trauma-informed systems thinking, and Universal Design for Learning. She designs learning environments that foster psychological safety, belonging, and intellectual risk-taking while maintaining high academic standards.
She is particularly committed to preparing educators who can teach rigorously, ethically, and humanely across diverse and high-stakes contexts, including higher education in prison, early childhood classrooms, and community settings. Her teaching is dialogic, inquiry-driven, and rooted in the belief that lived experience is a source of knowledge, not a liability.
Trauma-informed- Recognizing trauma as a central organizing force and designing instruction that responds with care and structure.
Culturally Responsive- Centering students’ cultural backgrounds and lived experiences as assets in every learning environment
Universal Design- Offering multiple pathways to engagement, expression, and mastery so every learner can access the work.
Lisette did not choose this work. This work chose her. Every classroom she has walked into, every program she has built, every student she has sat beside has deepened one conviction: that education is not just the most powerful weapon we have; it is the most personal one too.
Education changes everything. Let’s build something that lasts.
The need is real, and the work cannot wait. If you’re ready to expand access, develop your people, or build something that serves your community, we invite you to connect with us.
