Elaine Johnson, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Honorary Fellow of Huron University College, Canada, is the recipient of many teaching awards including the prestigious Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Chicago.  Johnson holds a B.A. with honors from Mills College, an M.A. from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. Formerly a high school department chair, community college dean, and tenured university professor, currently Johnson is the Executive Director of  MBM Associates. For almost twenty years, MBM Associates has helped business leaders and educators place their work in the context of brain research

Widely respected for her work on contextual teaching and on the brain research that supports it, Johnson has given hundreds of presentations to universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, and  businesses in the United States and Europe. Her books Contextual Teaching and Learning (Corwin Press, 2002), The Dismantling of Public Education and How to Stop It (Rowman &  Littlefield, 2004),  and Literature for Life and Work (McGraw Hill, 1997), a series of co-authored literature textbooks for grades 9-12, have significantly increased awareness of  the influence of context on the brain. Johnson's books and classroom experience demonstrate that students succeed when they connect the content of academic lessons with the context of their own experience.

Elaine Johnson lives with her husband, Tom Johnson, in Portland,  Oregon, where she recently completed a book entitled Banking and Betrayal, a study of one bank's failure in the early 1920s, and where she teaches as an adjunct English professor at Marylhurst University.