Maggie Peterson, Ph.D. | Founding & Former Executive Director

Maggie Polizos Peterson, Ph.D. is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership in the College of Education at The University of Maryland, College Park. There, she instructs literacy courses for pre-service teachers in the Elementary Education, Secondary Education, and MCERT programs. She is the Director of the University of Maryland Writing Project. This project creates and delivers grant-supported professional development for teacher inquiry for writing instruction, creates classroom writing communities, and forms teacher leadership. She has facilitated The Memory Project, a writing workshop for Holocaust survivors at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since its inception in 2001. A 2000 graduate of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, her current work focuses on the meaning-making processes of writing and writing as a tool for teacher agency and professional development. She approaches writing as a liberatory process that is integral to Critical Literacy. She also teaches Phenomenological Inquiry, a research methodology that foregrounds writing as a mode of researching lived human experience.

Maggie served as MILE’s founding Executive Director from 2023 to 2025.