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A closeup of a white woman's face. She is smiling gently. She has brown hair that is blowing in the breeze. She is wearing a grey sweater over a red shirt.

Read more about Dr. Kearns’ professional activities on her Biography page.

Kearns short CV Nov 2024Download
Kearns CV June 2025Download

Dr. Katie Kearns is an educator, scholar, and author about the experiences of graduate students. In 2024, she joined the Professional Development Hub (pd|hub), a national initiative to develop evidence-based career development models for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. She was employed with Indiana University’s graduate school and teaching center from 2005-2023, supporting graduate students and their development and instructional capacities. Her workshops and talks include identity development, building a mentor network, preparing a statement of teaching philosophy, communities of practice, and PhD careers within higher education. Kearns has co-edited two books, Teaching as if Learning Matters (Indiana University Press, 2022) and Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate (Purdue University Press, 2024) and published in educational development journals. She received a PhD in ecology and taught biology at the University of Georgia and Boston University.

Blog

Katie sporadically writes blogs for graduate students and the people who mentor them about graduate student wellbeing and identity development. She also writes about her personal interests including glass blowing, creativity, explorations, community, and living with complex PTSD.

Recent posts
  • A large fire in a firepit. The fire is about person-sized, with sticks at the bottom. It is bright orange.
    A love letter to educational developers
    This is an invitation for educators of goodwill to put fortitude, hope, and courage into the collective pot to share and borrow as needed. Below is what comes to mind for me today.
  • In a fire cauldron, a large fire burns that is mostly orange
    What’s my vision of the future?
    I don’t recall the series of prompts that invited our imaginations to speak of our future-visions. Yet this campfire scene is my vision of the future that came to me during that keynote. In this future-vision, I move among groups of people as they share stories of memory-keeping, surviving, and thriving. Through songs and recipes, children’s games and elders’ wisdom, they make space for each other’s nourishment, wonder, play, growth, companionship, and comfort. 
  • A picture of a sign that says "Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory Southern Research Station, US Department of Agriculture". There are pine trees around the sign and rolling mountains in the distance. It's a sunny day. The picture is yellowed.
    Changing course
    As much as I enjoyed living in the mountains of western North Carolina, I became aware that I did not enjoy the experiment and field work enough to keep going or do it over. The research question was important, but I needed to not be the person doing it with degree progress depending on the weather cooperating. My dissertation life had become unmanageable to me.
  • Asking powerful questions
    My former graduate students have been stepping into their power, and I am delighted. They are keeping their fires lit. Meanwhile, I feel like my internal house has been burning down and left to ashes. I have been in my own stalled labor into elderhood. In the last five years, I have witnessed as an academic doula so many miscarriages of power and so much distressed and stalled labor among the graduate students I supported and staff I had the honor of walking beside. It hurt my heart and squashed my spirit to witness, to be a part of, and to not be able to prevent or cure. Almost a year ago today, I gave a keynote talk about professional crossroads at a national conference on grad and postdoc career development. To all of you reading who attended my talk, I’m sorry. It was my best at the time, but it was not the storytelling I am capable of when I am calm, anchored, and clear in the story that wants to be heard. I was definitely at a professional and personal crossroads. I was “knocked on [my] ass by the demands of leading,” from Jerry Colonna’s book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up (Harper, 2019, p. 47). I had left a job just weeks before that wasn’t a good fit for my passions, talents, gifts, interests, and higher purpose. An interesting thing DID happen while I was at that conference that planted a delightful seed, that ever so slightly moved me out of the deconstruction and demolition phase. That’s when the therapeutic seed was planted that I wanted the skill of coaching.
  • ears of multicolor corn
    Fall Harvest
    I have been compassionately harvesting pedagogy lessons from this past semester teaching a graduate course in college pedagogy. Harvesting seems like an appropriate word given the end of fall and beginning of winter is upon us. Parker Palmer’s poem, The Harrowing offers grace and guidance about harvesting and plowing, reminding us to plow, not to dig up the past and find all the faults, but to prepare for the future growing season. 
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art career coaching community creativity education educational development family fears graduate-school grief havening hero's journey higher-education identity initiation learning love mental health mentoring motivation pedagogy phd publications research storykeeping tattoos teaching trauma wellbeing