Teresa Elguera

Brooklyn, New York

Email: tresatres@gmail.com
Website:

Social Media & Blogs

Twitter:
Facebook:
LinkedIn:
YouTube:

Bio:

Teresa Elguera has over 20 years of experience coaching teenagers, young people and adults to develop as both learners and leaders of their own learning. In schools, communities and homes, Teresa performs as teacher, counselor, organizer and parent, grounding her work in the experience of her participants and using play as her medium. Playing games that engage the group and its individuals in intellectual and social pursuits on both the micro and macro levels, Teresa teaches new methodologies, in turn teaching new skills. Working with teachers across the content areas, Teresa shows teachers how group games can engage everyone in the content at their own level, at the same time, in every age group. With attention to metacognition, she also teaches teachers how to develop new games or modify existing games to meet particular content or group needs, be it language, math, social-emotional learning or anything else!

Teresa’s interest in intersectionality and progressive education runs deep; in 1991she received her BA from Hampshire College, for her self-devised inter-disciplinary program of study, “Race, Class and Gender Issues through Literature, History and Law.” After teaching English in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, organizing farmworkers (and working on farms) in rural Mexico and founding a yearly Latinx Youth Conference in Seattle, Teresa came home to New York to study Bilingual Education. In 2003 she received an M.S.Ed. from Bank Street College of Education, with a thesis titled “Games for Learning?”

In 2006, Teresa found the Eastside Institute and added improvisational games to her repertoire, deepening her understanding of how and why play is so valuable in the classroom. Most recently, Teresa has been interested in using improvisation to release initiative in addressing the climate crisis. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.