Cohort 1
Natalie Aeschliman EDUCATION • M.A. in Library and Information Studies UW-Madison • B.S. in Secondary English Education Kansas State University
ENROLLED • Cohort 1
LOCATION • Madison, Wis.
Natalie Aeschliman is the library media specialist at Toki Middle School in the Madison Metropolitan School District. A school librarian since 2020, she previously taught high school English in the Monona Grove School District, and her work in both roles has centered on making literacy accessible to students on their own terms. At Toki, she led a genrefication of the fiction collection that included student-driven integration of Spanish-language titles into the main stacks, a project she presented at the 2026 WEMTA conference. She also oversees weekly student media production and has served on a district committee developing guidance for student technology use. Her doctoral interests begin with a definition of literacy that extends past reading and writing into the capacity to interpret one’s environment and seek out information about it. Her research focuses on storytelling as a literacy practice capable of crossing disciplinary lines, particularly into weather science. Having grown up in the Great Plains, she carries a longstanding interest in severe weather, an area where the transmission of knowledge across generations can determine survival outcomes. She is especially interested in what American Indigenous storytelling traditions convey about severe weather, and in how those methodologies might inform K-12 instruction. Because storytelling has traditionally been an intimate practice, she also studies how digital tools and media literacy can expand access to it at scale. Natalie has no plans to leave the school library, where she intends to keep building programs that connect students with texts and with each other. Looking further ahead, she hopes to extend her research beyond school walls through community partnerships, bringing storytelling-based approaches to weather literacy to audiences that schools alone cannot reach.
5
Ed.D. in Language and Literacy
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