Brittany R. Collins, M.Ed., is an author and educator whose work explores the impacts of grief, trauma, and disability on adolescent and adult wellbeing.
“How can we best support young people during their hardest moments?” This is the question that drives Brittany’s work. In an effort to understand it, she wrote two books for teachers: Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students (Heinemann/Houghton-Mifflin, ’21) and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning (Routledge, ’25, w/ Dr. Marlee Bunch), which explore the creation of learning spaces that support students’ and teachers’ wellbeing, particularly in times of change.
Her books complement 90+ articles in such outlets as The Washington Post; The Boston Globe; The Hechinger Report; Inside Higher Ed; Ms. Magazine; Greater Good Magazine; Education Week; Edutopia; English Journal and Literacy & NCTE of the National Council of Teachers of English; NCTE’s Special Issues Volume, Trauma-Informed Teaching: Toward Responsive, Humanizing Classrooms; Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Usable Knowledge; Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals; Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global; and We Need Diverse Books.
As a former Contributing Editor at Edutopia, Brittany learned with and from teacher-writers as she covered the school leader beat and managed editorial workflows for 170+ articles written by K-12 educators and administrators. She’s served as a Reviewer at Columbia University’s Teachers College Press, Harvard Review, New England Review, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique; is a Women’s Media Center “SheSource Expert” in education and arts and culture; and is the 2025 recipient of a National Council of Teachers of English Leadership Award for service and scholarship advancing accessibility in education.
With passions for translational research and collaboration, Brittany has worked with students and teachers through Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education; Columbia University; New York University; Smith College; Boston University; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; PBS Learning Media; Heinemann Professional Development Services; Race Project Kansas City; Write the World; the How Kids Learn Foundation; the Public Education and Business Coalition; Clark County Children’s Mental Health Consortium; Zionsville Community Schools; School Crisis Recovery and Renewal/National Child Traumatic Stress Network; the National Association of Social Workers (NY); the National Council for the Social Studies; Rutgers-New Brunswick Graduate School of Education; and the City University of New York.
Currently, she is working on two books at the intersections of disability studies, health psychology, and the learning sciences:
Supporting Students with Serious Illnesses: A Guide for Middle and High School Educators, exploring the holistic education of adolescents with serious and/or life-limiting illnesses (forthcoming w/ Oxford University Press).
How We Bear It: Invisible Illnesses and the Women Impacted by Them, about the oft-misunderstood diseases ME/CFS, dysautonomia, and Long COVID and the psychosocial experiences of women-identifying individuals adapting to them (represented by Janklow & Nesbit Associates).
Brittany studied English and Education at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Creative Nonfiction at the Yale Writer’s Workshop; and holds a Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies from the Trauma Research Foundation. She earned her M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction, Social-Emotional Learning, from the University of Virginia.
In her free time, she enjoys musical theater, knitting, film, wandering through any type of museum, and laughing with friends young and old.
