{"id":489,"date":"2022-05-13T11:20:27","date_gmt":"2022-05-13T16:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/?p=489"},"modified":"2022-05-13T11:20:27","modified_gmt":"2022-05-13T16:20:27","slug":"meet-an-alumna-valerie-lott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/2022\/05\/meet-an-alumna-valerie-lott\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet an Alumna: Valerie Lott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valerie Lott, M.Ed. 2018, on how the CDA program contributed to her continued learning<\/b><\/p>\n

Valerie Lott is a December 2018 graduate of the CDA program. She currently is completing her final year of law school at Elon University and aspires to be a civil rights attorney. Before coming to Peabody, Lott studied Education at Louisiana Tech.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Vanderbilt Peabody College\u2019s emphasis on education is what drew her to the CDA program. Originally, Valerie Lott came to CDA looking to contribute to the reimagination of public schools and thought this degree was better suited than a policy degree for those purposes because of the practicum and final project opportunities over doing a thesis. However, it was in her final semester she realized she would like to go to law school and it was the \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d style of the program that allowed her to pursue more education with confidence.<\/p>\n

Consistent with her expectations of the program, Valerie found the final project to be one of the most fulfilling aspects of her experience in CDA. For her final project, she developed a curriculum for 8th grade students to learn about Nashville\u2019s civil rights history with the goal of increasing sense of spatial awareness and ties to the community since nearly all the middle school students she worked with through another job had no knowledge of this history.<\/p>\n

Acknowledging the limits of her knowledge, Lott sought out Dr. Rip Patton<\/a>, a civil rights activist and veteran of the Freedom Riders, to collaborate on the project to make sure the curriculum was accurate and empowering. Alongside building a curriculum, Valerie and Dr. Patton also created a children\u2019s book depicting Nashville\u2019s history. Their book was picked up by an agent and at this moment is being distributed to publishing houses in the U.S. to find the right publisher.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the program, Valerie says CDA\u2019s required theory courses inform a lot of her perspective, \u201cIt has helped me have a better approach to understanding the law in a different way because I\u2019m thinking of the theories from CDA.\u201d Two classes that really impacted her thinking were Theories of Inequality with Dr. Barnes and Program Evaluation with Dr. Suiter. She notes, \u201c[Program Evaluation] is a skill that I put on my resume and share in an interview to show what CDA actually was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since finishing the CDA program, one of her most recent positions was working as a fellow at the NAACP. She notes, \u201cI have the language from CDA that helps me better understand civil rights cases and how to approach legal issues within an organization that was founded by a multiracial group of people.\u201d Further, she explained that CDA helped her think about the contextual histories of why certain laws exist.\u00a0 She says, \u201cI\u2019ll raise my hand in class and can say from an informed place that this is the history so let\u2019s ask these questions of the law. If it weren\u2019t for CDA, I wouldn\u2019t be able to bring that to the classroom. Right now, I\u2019m doing that in my First Amendment speech class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, Valerie sees one of the main outcomes of the CDA program is to prepare people to ask hard questions and create a personal method for how to work with partners in communities in effective and intentional ways. Last, Valerie left a bit of advice for any prospective and current CDA students. \u201cAsk the hard questions. If you feel like something in your practicum or final project or thesis is meaningful, though it may not be the easiest thing to do, that doesn\u2019t mean you shouldn\u2019t do it. If you\u2019re told no, it\u2019s ok to keep trying. CDA is about being creative about change. I\u2019m really thankful my project ended up as it did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valerie Lott, M.Ed. 2018, on how the CDA program contributed to her continued learning Valerie Lott is a December 2018 graduate of the CDA program. She currently is completing her final year of law school at Elon University and aspires to be a civil rights attorney. Before coming to Peabody, Lott studied Education at Louisiana…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9512,"featured_media":461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-alumni"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/peabodycda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}