Blue Sky Lab Staff
Director: Dr. Emily Allen
Dr. Emily Allen is the founding Director of the Blue Sky Teaching and Learning Laboratory, a John Martinson Honors College initiative that launched in 2021-2022. The Blue Sky Lab (BSL) focuses on translating and scaling high-impact pedagogies incubated in the John Martinson Honors College and in connecting the college outward to other educational institutions and communities.
From 2012-2021, Professor Allen served as the Honors College’s first Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, in which position she oversaw the development of the college’s interdisciplinary courses, curriculum, and faculty; contributed to imagining its co-curricular structures; and helped set the vision and goals of Purdue’s first academic-residential college. For the college’s 10th anniversary, she published a history of the its founding and development with a team of 18 current and former honors students: Forging the Future: A History of the John Martinson Honors College, 2013-2023 (Purdue University Press).
She is also Associate Professor in the English Department, where her primary scholarly area is nineteenth-century British literature and culture, particularly the novel. She is the author of Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form (Oxford University Press) and Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (The Ohio State University Press), and she is a founding member of NAVSA, the North American Victorian Studies Association. Read more about Dr. Allen.
Assistant Director: Dr. Temitope F. Adeoye
Temitope (Temi) Adeoye is a clinical assistant professor and Assistant Director of the Blue Sky Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University. She earned her BS in Psychology in 2011 from Morgan State University, a historically Black university in Baltimore, MD. She then came to Purdue University and earned her MSEd in 2019 and PhD in 2022 in Educational Studies. Her prior research has examined student motivation, student engagement, collaborative groupwork, and disciplinary belonging.
Temi has a passion for supporting student success that developed from a need to challenge the assumption that Black and brown students and students facing academic setbacks are disposable. Instead of fostering environments of competition that suggest there are limited opportunities to excel, Temi believes educators can best support student success by intentionally creating environments that integrate students’ diverse knowledge into existing disciplinary practices. Currently, Temi is using motivational theories to examine academic persistence among racially marginalized undergraduate students. Specifically, she investigates the assets that Black, Hispanic & Latinx, and Native American students draw on to persist after facing a setback. Through her work in the Blue Sky Lab, Temi works with faculty and students to explore interdisciplinary identity development and pedagogies. She also is the Program Director of the Blue Sky Summer Scholars Program, the Heads Up Tutoring & Life Skills Program, and the Blue Sky Learning Advocates Program.
Temi is also engaged with the local community and has served in various roles in the Heads Up Tutoring and Life Skills Program in Greater Lafayette. As a volunteer and site director, she has recruited college and community volunteers to offer weekly homework help and social development for K–12 youth living in government-assisted housing complexes in Greater Lafayette. Temi enjoys playing volleyball, singing the wrong lyrics to her favorite songs (with confidence), and streaming action movies or crime thrillers with her husband.
Graduate Research Assistant: Rose Mbewe
Rose Mbewe is a PhD student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in Purdue’s College of Education, where she is pursuing her doctorate in Mathematics Education. She earned a MSc at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Zambia. Her research interests are in global social justice in mathematics education. She is passionate about creating equitable learning environments for every student. She has worked as site director for Purdue CDF Freedom School, a summer program for local youth.
