Name: Mark Kissling
Faculty profile: Mark Kissling
Title: Associate Professor of Education (Social Studies Education)
Department: Curriculum and Instruction
Phone: (814) 865-2210
Email: mtk16@psu.edu
Office address: 154 Chambers Building
Directory entry: https://ed.psu.edu/directory/mtk16
Kissling teaches and advises students in the Language, Culture & Society (LCS) and Social Studies Education (SSED) graduate programs and in the middle level (grades four to eight) teacher education program, for which he is the leader of the ML Social Studies option. A former social studies teacher in Framingham, Massachusetts, he received a doctorate in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education from Michigan State University. As a place-based educator, Kissling studies and teaches about the ways in which place (as a concept) and places (as specific lived relationships) matter in the lives, learning and teaching of students and teachers. He implicates several important terms in relation to place and education, notably: lived experience, story, citizenship, patriotism and sustainability. Kissling focuses on how people, particularly those in schools, make sense of their lived experiences in and across the many places of their lives, and believes the best way to access this meaning is through story.