About

Micah Card is a writer/artist, educator, and researcher in Santa Cruz, CA.

Currently a PhD candidate at The University of California, Santa Cruz, Micah is an interdisciplinary scholar of culture, knowledge, and power. Their research centers on the workforce and political economy of early childhood education (ECE), specifically how cultural-historical narratives around race, gender, labor, and science shape the working conditions and politics of expertise in the field. From this perspective, Micah uses qualitative methods and critical theories to examine and illuminate the lived experiences of early educators across policy contexts.

Micah is a 2025 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation fellow. Her study, Problematizing the Panacea: Early Childhood Educators' Experiences, Perceptions, and Priorities in the Context of California’s Universal Preschool Rollout, has also been supported by a grant from the UCSC Center for Labor and Community and UCSC Science and Justice Research Center as a 2024-25 Science and Justice Training Program Fellow.

Micah holds an M.A. in Education from UC Santa Cruz, a B.A. in Gender Studies from SF State, and an Early Childhood Associate Teacher credential from the American Montessori Society. She has also served as a California Mentor Teacher, certified by the California Early Childhood Mentor Program, UCSC Graduate Pedagogy Fellow, and Professional Development Teaching Fellow for the UCSC Department of Education.

Over a two-decade teaching career, Micah has worked with learners across the lifespan, from early childhood to higher ed. As a preschool teacher, Micah also published an early childhood blog, led workshops for educators and parents, and independently consulted on practices for teaching and living in relation to young children. No Magic Lecture was both the title of the blog and the central pedagogical principle on which this work was grounded.

Micah has likewise published and presented work on progressive early childhood education, constructivist pedagogies, intersectional perspectives on children’s rights and the ECE workforce, and critical media literacy, authoring the teaching guide for "The Media and Me" (2022), published by Censored Press.

A lifelong writer, musician, and artist, every part of Micah’s work and pedagogy has been shaped and rendered more meaningful by her own experience as a creative agent. She has published works of creative nonfiction and poetry, including A Series of Engagements, a chapbook of poems written in and about formal art spaces published by tenderness lit. Her writing has also been published by Vagina::The Zine, Lummox Press, and in the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, among others. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2017 Lummox Press Poetry Contest and the 11th Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award. 

Micah’s visual and performance art has previously been featured in group shows in the Central Valley and Bay Area of California. In 2009, she was honored to join Maris Bustamante and Megan Geary as part of “Ink Ac(complies).” The performance project served as an expression of solidarity with the legacy of Bustamante’s and Monica Mayor’s transformational work in the feminist art group Polvo De Gallina Negra — solidarity she continues to express intellectually, politically, and aesthetically in all aspects of her work (as well as on her arm).