Krista Mallo, Ph.D.

Dr. Mallo currently serves as the Advisor for the Associate of Arts degree in General Studies and Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies, as well as the Director of the Learning Resource Center. Dr. Mallo has been married since 2002 and has five children. She has been a member of the International Society of Self-Directed Learning, National Council of Teachers of English, and Florida Council of Teachers of English. She has published poetry in Meta: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Effects of Grace: A Christian Anthology, and with the American Educational Research Association. Her doctoral dissertation, Persistence Like a Mother: Nursing the Narrative toward Doctoral Completion in English Education- An Autoethnography (2020), provides a poetic study of the persistence development of a self-directed learner. Dr. Mallo has been a Florida certified teacher since 2001 in the areas of English, ESOL, and ESE. As an active member of the local homeschooling community, she has operated a private school for K-12 distance learners, Florida Academy of Excellence, since 2016. She earned her B.A. in English Literature (2001), M.A. in English Education (2005), and Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction (2020) at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include narrative methodologies, poetic inquiry, autoethnography, and self-directed learning. Nominee for the 2021 Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award from the International Institute for Qualitative Inquiry for my dissertation titled Persistence Like a Mother: Nursing the Narrative toward Doctoral Completion in English Education- A Poetic Autoethnography "She Said I should Call Her Jenni" accepted for publication in Inquiring Together: Philosophical Mentoring in Qualitative Research (forthcoming, 2021)