Biography
Deborah Mapp‐Embry, Ed.D
Deborah Mapp‐Embry, Ed.D., a.k.a. Dr. Mapp, is the Performance Consultant for Inspired Schooling Solutions. She has an Education Doctorate in Instruction and Administration with an emphasis in Educational Leadership and Social Justice. Dr. Mapp has taught in a child development program, in middle and high schools, and in higher education. In addition, she has worked as a teacher leader, district curriculum coordinator, school‐wide adolescent literacy coach, city‐wide career counselor and administrator in a community agency.
Dr. Mapp’s childhood began in a segregated southern city with seven siblings and Civil Rights activist parents. She lived in an all‐African American world until schools were desegregated when she was a junior at the "home of the rebels" where no European American students spoke to her for two years. Dr. Mapp’s mother was from a large and close‐knit extended family with rural Kentucky roots, which helped to ground her in different lifestyles and family ties. This upbringing helped Dr. Mapp to understand the challenges and sacrifices of the 50s and 60s and the need to learn from the past to have better future results.
Because of her childhood experiences and her involvement in the 70s with the Black Power movement, Dr. Mapp felt a need to go through a conscious metamorphosis before teaching in desegregated schools with diverse students and colleagues. She vowed to become a change agent as she helped students develop strategies to excel academically and have more success in life, while assisting colleagues in working more positively with all students.
Dr. Mapp understands that teaching, learning, and schooling are impacted by historical, political, and social forces, which are often complex and work on multiple levels. She knows that a holistic approach is needed to shift our perception of relationships, connections, prediction and control since they are qualities that constantly change. The performance of all school stakeholders have to evolve and change at home, in the community, and in education institutions so they can better prepare and support children in their efforts to meet 21st century challenges and opportunities.
As a consultant, Dr. Mapp assists individuals and organizations by analyzing their current practices and recommending changes so that all students will develop to their full potential and not just those within the status quo. She also conducts workshops, develops professional development sessions and curricula, and can speak on a variety of topics tailored to her clients’ needs. And Dr. Mapp offers writing and freelance services. Some of her recent contracts include Kentucky State University, Dress for Success Louisville, the Louisville Catholic Enrichment Center, and Kentucky Department of Education.
Dr. Mapp sits on the Arts Council of Louisville board, is a Family and Youth Ministry supervisor at her church, member of the Kentucky Commissioner of Education Closing Achievement Gaps Council, and volunteers in her community through various capacities. And she is a proud parent of a daughter (PhD) and four sons who have engineering degrees and six amazing grandchildren!
And Dr. Mapp is revising her nationally recognized dissertation into a book that will help school stakeholders move beyond the status quo as they speak and act on previously unspoken messages. Her father, James R. Mapp, has written his memoir as a Civil Rights pioneer in Chance or Circumstance. Both books and a revised You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher with common core inclusions will be published in 2014.