With a background in arts education, creative storytelling, and multimedia production, Sheya is the senior project manager of The Open Canopy (formerly Out of Eden Learn), an online learning platform that promotes intercultural inquiry and exchange among youth around the world.
PZ Work
Sheya is the project manager of The Open Canopy (formerly Out of Eden Learn), an online learning platform that promotes intercultural inquiry and exchange among 85,000+ youth around the world. Formerly, Sheya was the project manager and media specialist for Making Across the Curriculum, an Agency by Design project that applies the practices and pedagogies of maker-centered learning across a variety of contexts and content areas.
Beyond PZ
In addition to The Open Canopy, Sheya founded and directed the JusticexDesign (JxD) project in collaboration with colleagues in Washington, D.C. JxD is a research initiative that since 2019 has been investigating how young people engage critically with—and understand the relationships between—design, representation, power, and participation.
Before joining Project Zero in 2014, she worked in the nonprofit sector as a youth program director, educator, and teaching artist. Sheya has a degree in Multimedia Journalism and Arab Studies and a Master of Arts in Teaching Arabic. Her doctoral studies applied anticolonial research methods through a dynamic and visual storytelling study with Arab young adults in Nashville. When she isn’t working as a researcher, Sheya is a practicing herbalist and woodworker.
Sheya's Projects and Publications
Dive into Sheya's PZ publications
Sheya's PZ Publications
- An Introduction to Out of Eden Learn
- Connecting Everyday Objects to Bigger Systems
- Connecting Our Own Lives to the Past
- Core Learning Journey Curricula
- Creating Neighborhood Maps
- Critical Sensitivity to Design Questions
- Critical Sensitivity to Design Questions
- Dialogue Toolkit
- Documenting the Everyday
- JusticexDesign: Developing a Sensitivity to Design Injustices
- Learning from Other Generations
- Making Memory
- Messages, Choices, Impacts
- On the Trail with Out of Eden Learn and Paul Salopek
- Out of Eden Learn Information Packet
- Out of Eden Learn Platform Tour
- Out of Eden Learn White Paper
- People, Systems, Power, Participation
- Power, Possibilities, Me
- Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation
- Taking Apart to Build Stories of Change
- Truth and Historical Amendment: Critical Mending in the Classroom
- Truth and Historical Amendment: Critical Mending in the Classroom
- Uncovering the Everyday
- Voice and Choice
- Voice and Choice Learner Workbook
- Voice and Choice: Developing a Sensitivity to What—and Who—is Not Represented
- Voice, Choice, and Mending
- What is Justice x Design?
- Youth Neighborhood Maps from Around the World
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