Jamillah Gilbert, Ph.D.
Director, School of Teacher Preparation
National College of Education
Dr. Gilbert teaches graduate-level courses in Special Education.
Dr. Gilbert has expertise in High-Leverage Practices, Trauma-Informed Education, Social-Emotional Learning, Mental Health, and Secondary Transition Planning. She also has experience developing anti-bias and anti-racist curriculum.
Jamillah Gilbert (preferred pronouns: she/her) is a special education teacher with 30 years of experience teaching diverse students in diverse levels, programs, and settings.
Dr. Gilbert’s teaching and learning philosophy is: Growth in skill and knowledge occurs most often when connections are made and bridges from the familiar to the unfamiliar are crossed. She knows that there are more avenues available than there are often presented – especially to the ones most marginalized in society. Her commitment is to help build bridges of access and encourage students to make critical connections. The framework from which she leads is Transformative, and the theoretical lenses through which she teaches and researches are Intersectionality and DisCrit.
Before joining our NLU faculty, Dr. Gilbert most recently served as the Assistant Director of Curriculum Services at Illinois State University (ISU), where she oversaw the curriculum, instruction, and student support programming for all of the First Year Experience courses, Transfer Student courses, and Developmental Math courses at the university. Before that, she taught at ISU as an Instructional and Clinical Assistant Professor. She has also taught for fourteen years in higher ed at Illinois Wesleyan University, Greenville College, and Heartland Community College, and in PreK-12 classrooms for fifteen years.
In addition to clinical supervision and teacher preparation, Dr. Gilbert has expertise in Practice-Based Teaching, Universal Design for Learning, and Trauma-Informed and High-Leverage Instructional Practices. She also has experience developing anti-bias curriculum and delivering professional development on topics such as secondary transition planning, mental health needs, online teaching, qualitative research methods, and increasing access and equity in the classroom.
Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Foundations, Illinois State University
M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction, Illinois State University
B.S. in Special Education, Illinois State University
Dr. Gilbert’s preferred research methodology is post-intentional phenomenology. Her research interests are in the Special Education teacher, their perceptions of behavior and social norms, and the impact of social identity on their perceptions.
jgilbert11@nl.edu
312-261-3220
