Meet Our Scholars: Mari Perrella

[Speaker: Mari Perrella] Dance reflects a lot of my personal kind of upbringing. Everyone in my family is related to the arts somehow, so it kind of became a really strong value for me. The transition into school psychology happened when I started working at Dr. Fabiano's lab. I think something that's really important is just addressing each student as an individual. So we have to kind of find a way that we can create learning environments that allow these students to really cultivate their own personal interests and passions and things that make them feel fulfilled and happy and excited to go to school every day. I applied for a Fulbright Award to the University of Warwick in England. Their program is really exciting for me because they have their School of Education, which has a partnership with their arts center on campus. And they're doing a lot of work and research trying to figure out how can we incorporate arts into classroom environments to help students think creatively, think outside of the box, find new solutions to old problems. I don't want to just do research and have it be in a journal and shared with people in academia, it really needs to be shared with the people in the community, because they're the ones who need the information most.