Sheeba Jacob is an Education Consultant. A lifelong educator, she began her career over 20 years ago as an elementary English language learner teacher in Washington, D.C., and continued teaching middle and high school language arts/humanities in D.C., Brooklyn, and India. After teaching and designing curriculum, she dedicated her work to school leadership, including roles such as the Dean at an all-girls school in Kenya and adjunct faculty of pre-service teachers at a university in Seattle. With a passion for storytelling and songwriting, she believes in uplifting the stories of those on the margins in order to center all of our humanity.
Sheeba’s decision to attend LMU was influenced by many factors that affected her on a personal level (becoming a mother for the first time), at a community level (systemic racial injustices repeatedly faced by students) and at a global level (the COVID-19 pandemic). The more she thought about her own place in how to impact educational equity, she was accumulating a growing set of questions that she wanted to more deeply understand. The social justice orientation of LMU’s Ed.D. Program resonated strongly with Sheeba’s desire to understand what solutions could look like to these pressing questions.
Sheeba’s dissertation, “‘Middle Schoolers are Just This Special Kind of Human Being’: Middle School Teacher Perspectives on Creating Hope for their Students and Themselves,” chaired by Lauren Casella, Ed.D., explored how urban middle school teachers facing these greater challenges have not only created conditions for hope within their classrooms, but also within themselves. During this period when adolescents have been experiencing unprecedented rates of trauma and mental health issues, she researched teacher practices and pedagogies that centered hope for students. At a time when teachers have experienced high burn-out rates, she investigated how personal hope and healing has manifested for teachers.
In addition to her coursework and dissertation, Sheeba also supported two middle schools and taught pre-service teachers. This combination of researching, teaching, and coaching supported her in truly enacting best practices. For example, course readings about the power of relationships as a way to support middle school students became fully relevant to her work by informing the way she approached coaching teachers. Similarly, she learned about ways in which teachers integrated topics of social justice and hope in their classrooms while, in parallel, she worked directly with pre-service teachers who developed lesson plans that integrated these themes.
From the camaraderie of her classmates, the support of the faculty and the offering of unique experiences, including a migration justice trip to Nogales, Mexico, Sheeba will forever be grateful for LMU’s Doctoral Program and the tools it has afforded her to navigate the pressing questions regarding educational equity for all students.
While enrolled in the Ed.D. Program, Sheeba participated in the prestigious UCEA Jackson Scholars Program and was also the recipient of LMU’s 2024 Graduate Library Research Award.