MEd, Wright State University
BS, University of Southern Maine
Get in Touch
pthompson@sjcme.edu | 413 Alfond Hall
Pamela has enjoyed a 32-year career as an educator, serving at all levels in pre-school, elementary, secondary, and college and university teaching. She has held faculty and administrative positions across six institutions of higher education and has lived and worked in South Dakota, Wyoming, Ohio, Colorado, New York, and Hawai'i, before returning to Maine in 2009. She holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Neuroscience and Learning.
Promoting a servant leadership style, Dr. Thompson strives to empower her colleagues and students by cultivating a spirit of curiosity and an ethos of authentic innovation.
Her current academic interests include emerging digital technologies and their instructional and curricular applications. Over her academic career, she has published articles and presented several conference papers on creativity, human rights education, geo-ethnography, performance ethnography, innovation in teacher education and the self-efficacy of teacher candidates in elementary mathematics.
In her spare time she enjoys walking along the coastlines, beaches, and woodland trails; painting in oils, reading a good mystery novel.
Affiliations
Council for Professional Recognition, Rethinking Credentials, Washington, D.C.
Maine Association for the Education of the Young Child, Board Member
Kennebec Valley Community Action Program Board of Directors, Board Member, Vice President
Recently Published Materials + Awards
Earned Credential, EDUCAUSE: Building a High Quality Micro-credential Program, 2023
Transcending the Lectern: Effective Applications and Evaluation of Mixed Realities in the College Classroom, Paper presented at the New England Educational Research Organization, Portsmouth, N.H. (2022)
Innovative Pedagogical Methods
Dr. Thompson promotes an ethical, inclusive, developmentally appropriate, and accessible application of virtual 360 and mixed realities in learning as they provide an opportunity to experience content in way that all learners can participate in and engage their imagination and creative ideas.
She believes that teaching is creative work and as much a science as an art, so it is important to use the arts as a partner in engaging learners in all content areas.
"The teacher should work in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom a self-disciplined will and judgement, un-perverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear." -Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential