Education
Following undergraduate study in Psychology and Disability Studies, Alex received her Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from The Pennsylvania State University in 2019. Her graduate coursework included Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Education; Politics of Disability; Identity Theories; Bakhtin and Education; Foucault and Education; Language, Identity, and the Development of Knowing; European Philosophy: Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, and Benjamin; Curriculum, Culture, & Child Development; Play and Early Childhood Education; Social Class and Early Childhood Education; and 3 semesters of independent study in Psychoanalysis under the supervision of a Professor of Education and child psychotherapist.
In addition to taking courses in Educational Ethnography, Contemporary Educational Ethnography, The Ethnographic Interview, Video Ethnography, Sensory Ethnography, and Community Ethnography, Alex received training in video ethnography as an assistant on a research project at an inclusive preschool in Paris, France grounded in “collectivist integration” informed by the institutional psychotherapy approach of the La Borde Clinic founded by Jean Oury and developed with Félix Guattari.
Post-graduate study
Alex is constantly seeking continuing education opportunities to develop expertise in creative psychotherapeutic approaches to working with young children in inclusive classrooms. She was a 2022-2023 fellow in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis at the Washington- Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis (WBCP) and the Contemporary Freudian Society. Alex also completed a fellowship at the Washington- Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis during the 2016-2017 academic year. She has participated in seminars at the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) on Object Relations-informed approaches to love in psychoanalysis, and completed a short course on “The Winnicotts’ Psychoanalytically-Informed Intervention in a Time of National Crisis”. Alex is currently a post-graduate student in WBCP’s New Directions: Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge program, where she is working to develop manuscripts from her dissertation research and classroom teaching experiences. She is also pursuing online study through Tavistock Portman to further her knowledge of child development and nurturing “troubled” children to inform her course instruction at Weber State.
Alex was also an Intersectional Pedagogy Fellow in the Transformative Intersectionality Collective (TRIC), year-long program of the University of Utah’s School of Social and Cultural Transformation, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She was featured in the Weber State President’s 2022 Annual Report for her contributions to the university’s commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
Non-academic study
Alex has completed 100 hours of yoga teacher training thus far and treasures opportunities to share practice with children in the laboratory school and beyond.
Alex Collopy, Ph.D. 