WILL NEWKIRK | DIRECTOR
Will Newkirk serves as the Director of the American Indian Catholic Schools Network. Before joining AICSN, he was the Assistant Director at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives, where he also worked on the pastoral team for the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Teaching Fellows program. Will received his bachelor's in Political Science from Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota in 2012.
From 2012 to 2014, he was a member of ACE Teaching Fellows, in which he taught third grade at Saint Catherine School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and earned an M.Ed. from Notre Dame. While teaching for three years at Saint Catherine, he also served as the school's athletic director. He is currently earning his doctorate through Loyola Marymount University's Educational Leadership for Social Justice program.
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BRIAN S COLLIER | SENIOR ADVISOR
Brian S Collier is currently Senior Advisor of the American Indian Catholic Schools Network (AICSN) and Faculty for the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to coming to work for ACE Collier was an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Arizona University. Collier's academic work focuses on Native Education, an interest that started when he was a teacher and dorm parent at St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Collier is working on a manuscript about Native American Catholic Education in the United States. Collier has published on American Indian Running (including a piece about Steve Gachupin and Jemez Pueblo), Native people at Notre Dame, American history, and the Harlem Globetrotters. Collier also edited a special edition of the Journal of the West on Catholic Native American Education (Vol 59, Summer 2020) along with, Notre Dame graduate student and former AICSN Intern, Collin Gortner, and AICSN Director Will Newkirk. He also is one of the co-editors on Indigenous Sustainability: First Nation Know How for Global Flourishing and an editor on College Student Voices on Educational Reform. He is also a founding member and long-time former chair of the Committee on Teaching and Public Education for the Western History Association.
Collier holds degrees from Loyola University Chicago (B.A. History with an emphasis in Women's studies, Philosophy, and Theology), Colorado State University (M.A. History with an emphasis in literature of the American West and Environmental History), and Arizona State University (Ph.D. with an emphasis in American Indian History, the American West, Gender History, and Education). Collier regularly teaches undergraduate courses on the History of Education in America, American Indian History, American Indian Education, and a new course entitled: God, Country, and Notre Dame - The Story of America told through one Catholic University. Collier teaches graduate courses with the Alliance for Catholic Education that include: Curriculum and Instruction, Active Teaching Methods, Assessment, Educational Psychology, and a History of Education course that is inclusive of race, class, and gender dynamics in schools.