Dr. Shannon Wheatley Hartman serves as President of the Interactivity Foundation, a post she rose to in 2023 following an initial appointment as an IF Fellow in 2010, with several years of service as Vice President and Director of Education along the way. As President, Shannon oversees all components of IF’s work.
Prior to her current role, Shannon developed the Collaborative Discussion Project, managed multiple sustained discussion projects, advanced various community conversation initiatives, and developed educational programming and curriculum.
Previously, Shannon was a full-time Lecturer of International Relations at Arizona State University, where she was awarded Teacher of the Year for the School of Politics and Global Studies. Shannon has also taught at a number of other institutions, including Drexel University, Kansas State University, and Haverford College. Her teaching interests and publications include a breadth of topics ranging from cosmopolitanism to deliberative democracy.
All of Shannon’s classes and community programs have been designed to nurture the processes that deliberately move participants toward a fuller humanity through collaborative discussion and perpetual learning. The purpose of her ongoing pedagogical experiments (in the classroom or broader community) is not to identify the best gimmicks for mastering content or persuading others toward a particular course of action, but to discover ways to improve collaborative intelligence, build social trust, and support active community engagement.
Shannon lives in Haverford, PA with her family.
