Connor Showalter-Swanson is a 2024-2025 Illinois Policy Fellow and an English as a second language/multilingual learner (ESL/ML) Teacher at Rauner College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. He moderates the school’s Newspaper Club and has served as a head coach for high school track and cross country. Connor was named St. Francis Indian School’s Teacher of the Year (2014) and a Distinguished Educator and Expert Mentor with the Modern Classrooms Project (2021-Present). He began his teaching career in South Dakota on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Reservation as a 2012 Teach For America corps member, teaching 6th-12th grade math. He earned his BA in journalism and a minor in sociology from Temple University, a MA in educational administration from the University of South Dakota, a MAT in middle school math with an endorsement in high school math from Dominican University (IL), and an English as a second language certification from the University of Phoenix.
