Dora has been a bilingual aid, classroom teacher, and program coordinator of bilingual/bicultural education at Dillingham City Schools. Her teaching was recognized in Alaska and nationally: in 1985 she was a recipient of Dillingham City Schools’ Excellence in Teaching, 1990 a Milken Educator Award and Alaska Teacher of the Year, and a 2001 recipient of the Alaska Federation of Natives education award. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Education in the Math in a Cultural Context (MCC) program.

From childhood on, she has been learning from and subsequently working with Yup’ik elders. During the past years through the MCC program, she has been sharing the lessons she learned from her mother and other elders and how these lessons apply to teaching school mathematics. From her mother, she learned a powerful “folding algorithm” which is foundational MCC’s new approach to teaching mathematics. She is also a co-author to journal articles and for some of the published MCC modules.