Dr. Penny Bryan

Penny Bryan received her Doctorate in Educational Leadership: Curriculum and Instruction in 1992 from the University of Pennsylvania, an R1 institution. Dr. Bryan has distinguished herself nationally and internationally in the areas of leadership, literacy, policy, and cultural studies. Her dissertation was a qualitative study that it combined traditional ethnography with narrative and interpretation and documented multiple levels of the systemic change process, converging personal, professional, and institutional change as well as a literacy staff development partnership between the urban private university and public schools.

Dr. Bryan continues to conduct scholarly work in the areas of leadership, multiple forms of literacy, importance of the arts and creativity in society, principles and practices of democracy, and restorative justice. She has authored, presented, chaired, and conducted workshops at American Educational Research Association, Association of Moral Education, the International Reading Association, International Leadership Association, and the World Conference on Restorative Justice as well as numerous local, state, national and international conferences. She has also collaboratively written and presented with colleagues, graduate students, their students, and K-12 educators. She has served as senior editor, editor, and associate editor of the California statewide academic journal, Journal of Educational Leadership and Administration: Teaching and Program Development. She has served as a proposal reviewer numerous times and recently as a manuscript reviewer for an educational book publisher. She has published book chapters and articles.

Dr. Bryan works as an educational consultant for Restorative Justice Circle. Her specialty is integration of the arts with circle practices. In order to deepen her own understanding and skillfulness, she participates in two ongoing Restorative Justice Practitioner Circles: A Peacekeepers Circle and an Anti-Racist Circle.

She is currently working with 11 Ph.D. graduates from the Attallah College who used arts-based research as a methodology in their dissertation studies. They are working on a book on the creative journey of using the arts in research.

Editorships, Editorial Boards and Article/ Manuscript Reviewer

Journal of Educational Leadership and Administration, Teaching and Program Development, Senior Editor, Editor, Associate Editor, Editorial Review Board

Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Founding Advisory Board Member, Chapman University

Russian American Educational Journal, Founding Editorial Board Member

Issues in Teacher Education, Editorial Review Board and Article Reviewer

Journal of School Leadership, Article Reviewer

Equity and Excellence, Special Issue: Social Justice and the Arts, Article Reviewer

American Educational Research Association: Multiple Special Interest Groups Conference Proposal Reviewer, Presenter, Chair

Leadership for Social Justice founding member, Critical Educators for Social Justice, Action Research, Democracy and Engaged Citizenship, Arts Based Research

Corwin Press, manuscript reviewer Leadership texts

St Martin’s Press, a division of Macmillan manuscript reviewer Children’s Literature/Literacy text