Affiliate Faculty

Wayne Au

Interim Dean and Professor, Educational Studies
University of Washington, Bothell

I am a committed scholar-activist, parent, and public intellectual who works to engage the public in debates about the racial, cultural, and class politics of public education policy and practice – especially regarding the injustices neoliberal, market reforms. I seek to simultaneously challenge the settler-colonialist, white supremacist, free-market, and patriarchal foundations of public education and radically democratize classrooms and school so that they can become spaces of liberatory practices and sites for building critical, transformative consciousness. My curriculum and pedagogy are grounded in a shared commitment to critique, a sharpening of political understanding, our potential for transformational justice, and the possibility of education for healing historical and cultural trauma.
Editor for the social justice teaching magazine and publisher, Rethinking Schools – www.rethinkingschools.org
Co-editor, Teaching for Black Lives – https://www.rethinkingschools.org/books/title/teaching-for-black-lives

Edmundo M. Aguilar

Assistant Teaching Professor, Education, Community, and Organizations, College of Education, University of Washington

My work is rooted in collective liberation—unequivocally and unapologetically. The intersectional teachings and moments of awakening that inspire me, and ultimately changed my life, are drawn from the Third World feminist movement. As the son of Mexican (im)migrants, decolonial Chicana feminism shapes my community-based scholarship and pedagogy, aimed at challenging systems of oppression rooted in settler colonialism. I approach this culturally responsive and sustaining work as a lifelong commitment to those impacted by injustice. Through digital media, such as documentary film, I counter hegemonic narratives that dehumanize and suppress resistance. This method of storytelling fosters healing, critical consciousness, and transformative change.

Megan Bang

Professor, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University

My work seeks to dream, co-design, and nurture educational spaces that contribute to just, sustainable, and culturally thriving communities. This takes on many forms but I am especially interested in examining the epistemic, ontological, and axiological dimensions of learning environments in order transform historically accumulating inequities – especially those born of settler colonialism – and make educational spaces that cultivate resurgence. I do this in part by studying culture, learning, and development broadly with a specific focus on the complexities and possibilities in navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing transformative learning environments.
Bang, M., & McDaid-Morgan, N. (accepted). Towards socio-ecological decision making as central to science education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
Bang, M., West, B., Hardison-Stevens, D. & Barajas, F. (accepted). Transforming History: Developing Teacher Education That Contributes to Thriving Native Communities. Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color.
Bang, M., Marin, A., & Medin, D. (2018). If Indigenous Peoples Stand with the Sciences, Will Scientists Stand with Us?. Daedalus, 147(2), 148-159.

Filiberto Barajas

Associate Professor and Director, Indigenous Education Initiatives
College of Education, University of Washington

I immigrated from México to the United States (Boyle Heights) during the 1980s. I am of P’urhépecha lineage with relationship to lands and waters in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán. I am also a former Diversity in Mathematics Education (DiME) NSF Fellow and earned a doctoral degree in Education from UCLA. I serve as an Associate Professor (Curriculum and Instruction/Learning Sciences and Human Development) in the College of Education at the University of Washington Seattle and as Director of Indigenous Education Initiatives and the Native Education Certificate Program. In collaboration with youth, families, teachers, community members and other scholars I intervene in Indigenous erasure by living Indigenous resurgence in my everyday life. A great deal of the work I engage with examines the realities of teaching and learning mathematics in schools serving predominantly African American, Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, poor/working-class, and immigrant youth. Central to this work is privileging youth/family experience, youth/family knowledge, cultural knowledge and culturally embedded forms of knowing. I contend that these forms of knowing offer both practical and theoretical insights on how race, culture, language, gender, class are intimately connected to the ways in which youth/families come to participate in mathematics learning. JUCHARI UINAPEKUA!
Barajas-López, F., & Bang, M. (2018). Indigenous Making and Sharing: Claywork in an Indigenous STEAM Program. Equity & Excellence in Education, 51(1), 7-20.
Ishimaru, A. M., Barajas-López, F., & Bang, M. (2015). Centering family knowledge to develop children’s empowered mathematics identities. Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 1(4), 1-21.
Barajas-López, F., & Ishimaru, A. M. (2016). “Darles el lugar” A Place for Nondominant Family Knowing in Educational Equity. Urban Education.

Maggie Beneke

Associate Professor, College of Education
Affiliate Faculty, Disability Studies
University of Washington

In solidarity with dis/ability justice communities, my scholarship is concerned with transforming deficit discourses surrounding young children’s identities and competencies, specifically young children of Color with dis/abilities. I come to this work as a white, en/abled, cis-hetero woman, and strive to divest myself from interlocking systems of power which allow me access to unearned advantage. Through critical, sociocultural analyses, I focus on how early educators, young children, and
families resist oppressive notions of “normalcy” through their daily interactions.
Recent publications:
Beneke, M. R., & Cheatham, G. A. (2019). Race talk in preschool classrooms: Academic readiness and participation during shared-book reading. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 19(1), 107-133.
Beneke, M. R., Park, C. C., & Taitingfong, J. (2019). An inclusive, anti-bias framework for teaching and learning about race with young children. Young Exceptional Children, 22(2), 74-86.
Beneke, M. R., Newton, J. R., Vinh, M., Blanchard, S. B., & Kemp, P. (2019). Practicing inclusion, doing justice: Disability, identity, and belonging in early childhood. Zero to Three, 39(3), 26-34.

Jondou Chen

Associate Teaching Professor
Education, Community, and Organizations
Learning Sciences and Human Development
College of Education, University of Washington

I’m a random neighborhood Asian uncle. I’m a Soufend community gardener and griller who loves stories and all the elders and dreamers who care for them. My family has always called the Pacific home and especially Taiwan, where people still pray at the raised roots of mangrove trees and light incense in alleyway temples. I’m always game to bring the generations together to pass around stories, to craft literally or metaphorically, and to imagine what delicious sustenance is yet to come.

Anthony Craig

Professor of Practice and Director, Leadership for Learning Program
College of Education, University of Washington

My work as an educator has been focused on reimagining formal education systems to truly reflect the communities they serve. The central idea in these endeavors has been about honoring the cultures of students and families in our schools. As a member of the Yakama Nation and living in the community of the Tulalip Tribes, I have found the cultural strengths in communities to be the most important resources for our systems. Extending beyond my own Indigenous communities, inherent in every community, we find incredible strengths. To realize educational justice, we will value these teachings and use them to imagine new possibilities and develop new practices and systems. Every aspect of learning and education is made stronger and more sustainable when we value the knowledge and ways of being in the communities we serve. Understanding how to leverage these strengths in the day-to-day processes of formal systems is an incredible opportunity to achieve justice.
Craig, Anthony. (In Press). Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Indigenous Strengths and Ways of Knowing. In M. Jacob (Ed.) On Indian Ground: A Return of Indigenous Knowledge—Generating Hope, Leadership and Sovereignty through Education, Northwest Volume. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Craig, Anthony. (2014). Classroom Teachers and Cultural Guides: Collaborating to Transform Teaching and Learning Through the Use of Traditional Tribal Knowledge. Anthony Craig. In P. McCardle & V. Berninger. (Eds.). Narrowing the Achievement Gap for Native American Students: Paying the Educational Debt. New York: Routledge.

Emma Elliott

Assistant Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

I am from Cowichan Tribes on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. My great-grandparents were Abraham and Ellen Johnny, Charlie Rice and Hilda Wesley Bob, Joseph Peters and Mary Jane Wise, and John and Emma Elliott.
I am an assistant professor in the department of Learning Sciences and Human Development. Much of my work centers on understanding the influence of historical, cultural, social, and political factors in relation to Indigenous health and wellbeing, and in particular seeks to understand the meanings of and explanations for Indigenous suicidal behavior. My work has expanded to consider how Indigenous and land-based programming that seeks to restore relationships to people, places, and practices
may be an effective response to educational and mental health inequities. My work grows from ethical frameworks generated by Indigenous and place-based knowledges and practices to create process-centered approaches that illuminate Indigenous pathways toward collective livelihood. The interdisciplinary intersections of my research include contemporary Indigenous issues; culture, learning, and human development; and trauma, prevention, and recovery.

Juan Guerra

Professor Emeritus, Department of English
University of Washington

I am professor of English and Chair of the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle where I teach courses on literacy, ethnography, autobiography, language variation, language policy, and composition and rhetoric. I have published a number of essays that explore the concept of writing across difference through what I describe as the critical practice of transcultural repositioning. In a recent book, Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities, I discuss a set of rhetorical and discursive tools related to language, culture and identity that disenfranchised students can use to navigate and negotiate pedagogical spaces they inhabit in writing classrooms and beyond as they prepare to become citizens in the making. I served as a senior mentor in NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Program for ten years and am now the program’s Director.
Recent Publications:
Guerra, Juan C. & Ann Shivers-McNair. “Toward a New Vocabulary of Motive: Re(con)figuring Entanglement in a Translingual World.” Crossing Divides:
Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs. Eds. Bruce Horner & Laura Tetreault. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2017. 19-30.
Bawarshi, Anis, Juan C. Guerra, Bruce Horner & Min-Zhan Lu, Eds. “Special Issue – Translingual Work in Composition.” College English 78.3 (January 2016).
Guerra, Juan C. Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities. New York: Routledge/NCTE, 2016.

Dawn Hardison-Stevens

Assistant Professor, Native American and Teacher Education, School of Education, University of Washington, Tacoma
Program Manager/Teaching Associate, Native Education Certificate Program
Teaching Associate, Teacher Education Program, College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle

My areas of expertise center on my commitment to the development and acceleration of inclusive programs and views that prepare learners to live, learn, and strive to better understand their connections to self, family, community, culture, history, and worldviews. I have worked extensively across these areas. My grandmother’s and grandfather’s lineage are of the Omushkeg Cree, Ojibway, Cowlitz, and Steilacoom Tribal peoples; I am also a descendant of the Northern Scandinavian nations. As an enrolled member of the Medicine Creek signing and historic Steilacoom Tribe, I serve my community as a Tribal Council member. My PK-12 experience, Teacher Education, and the Native Education Certificate Program highlights my collaborative sharing of Native knowledges, thus acknowledging keepers of story, science, land-based understandings, social wellness, leadership, education, and being. Life’s journeys create our own unique stories. My trajectory honors American Indian studies, leadership, and change, teaching and learning, and an early learning focus identifying we are educators from birth to death and beyond. My pathways uphold Indigenous representation and cultivates Native people’s success advocating intergenerational knowledge applications.
Hardison-Stevens, D. (2022). Learning with each other: A relational Indigenous leadership philosophy. In Pewewardy, C., Lees, A., and Minthorn, R. (Eds), Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education: The transformational Indigenous praxis model (pp.134-146). New York. Teachers College Press.
Conrad, J., Hardison-Stevens, D., & Wilson, L. (2021). Grandmother Cedar as Educator: Teacher learning through Native knowledges and sovereignty curriculum. American Educational Research Journal. (In review).
Elliott-Groves, E., Hardison-Stevens, D., & Ulrich, J. (2020). Indigenous Relationality is the Heartbeat of Indigenous Existence during COVID-19 [Special issue]. Journal of Indigenous Social Development, Indigenous Communities and COVID-19: Impact and Implications, 9(3), 158-169.
Bang, M., West, B., Hardison-Stevens, D. & Barajas, F. (accepted). Transforming History: Developing Teacher Education That Contributes to Thriving Native Communities. Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color.

Ann Ishimaru

Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

My research focuses on the intersection of leadership, community-school relations and equity-based systems change in P-12 education. Through community-based research, I seek to collaborate with the expertise and leadership of nondominant students, families, communities, and educators towards educational justice and community well-being. With Dr. Megan Bang, I lead the Family Leadership Design Collaborative, a national-level participatory design-based research project that re-centers nondominant families in racial equity efforts in education. I also collaborate with Dr. Filiberto Barajas-López and Dr. Min Sun in Cultivating Capacity for Racial Equity in Education, in partnership with Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association. I am currently writing a book entitled, Journeying to Educational Justice: Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities which draws across my work, including the Equitable Parent-School Collaboration Project (with Dr. Joe Lott), to help researchers, practitioners, and nondominant families collaborate in codesigning educational justice in our educational systems and communities.
Recent articles:
Ishimaru, A. M. (2018) “Re-imagining turnaround: families and communities leading educational justice”, Journal of Educational Administration, https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0013
Ishimaru, A.M., Rajendran, A., Montaño-Nolan, C. & Bang, M. (in press). Community design circles: Co-designing justice and wellbeing in family-community-research partnerships. Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 3(2).
Ishimaru, A.M. (2017). Ishimaru, A. M. & Takahashi, S. (2017). Disrupting racialized institutional scripts: Toward parent–teacher transformative agency for educational justice. Peabody Journal of Education, 1-20.

Joe Lott

Associate Professor and Director of Higher Education Leadership and the Brotherhood Initiative
College of Education, University of Washington

My work investigates how organizational cultures of large research universities create the conditions for disparate graduation rates between undergraduate men of color and their peers. I seek to understand how faculty, staff, students, and administrators can collaboratively work together, drawing from design-based principles, to create policies and establish practices to close the graduation gap between men of color and their peers. To that end, I co-founded the Brotherhood Initiative at the University of Washington, a research-to-practice initiative designed to increase the retention and graduation rates of undergraduate men of color by creating conditions of success through academic classes and co-curricular programming, collecting longitudinal data about their college experiences, and working with administrative leaders on campus to scale up promising principles and practices learned from the students and the various campus partners who work with them.
http://brotherhoodinitiative.org

Dana Nickson

Assistant Professor
Education Policy, Organizations and Leadership
College of Education, University of Washington

My work focuses on the relationships between Black families’ physical movement and place-
making practices to their access to schools and communities that they deem to be of quality and
affirming to their children. There is a rich tradition of movement as a means of agency and
resistance in Black communities given the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the U.S. and the
place-based nature of access to opportunity. I center Black families and students’ experiences
and epistemologies to produce deeper understandings of structural factors shaping educational
access and opportunity in demographically changing U.S. metropolitan regions.
Nickson, D. (2021). The democratization of educational care: Spatial imaginaries, demographic
change, and Black families continued educational advocacy. Equity & Excellence in
Education, 5(3), 303-316. doi: 10.1080/10665684.2021.2021613
Wilson, C., Nickson, D., Ransom, K. (2021). Spiriting urban educational justice: The leadership
of African American mothers organizing for increased school access and local control.
Journal of Educational Change. doi: 10.1007/s10833-021-09443-1

Lakeya Afolalu

Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture
Teaching, Learning & Curriculum

I am a creative writer, speaker, and Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in Teaching, Learning & Curriculum. Raised between my Nigerian and African American cultures, my hybrid identity is reflected in my work that focuses on Black African immigrant youth. Specifically, my research explores the role of language, literacy, including digital literacies, in Black African immigrant youth identity constructions and negotiations across school, community, and digital spaces. I pay particular attention to the intersection of racialization and socialization processes that influence their identities. I draw on my lived experiences, the wisdom of my former middle school students, and the arts to inform my creative approach to shifting static ideas about race, immigration, language, literacy, and identity. Throughout my career, I have partnered with youth, families, leaders, and organizations to enhance educational justice. My academic scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Literacy of Research, Teachers College Record, and the Journal of Research in Childhood Education. My public scholarship has been featured on various formats, including TEDx, ESSENCE Magazine, NPR Radio, ZORA, and SXSW.

Recent Publications:

• Omogun, L. & Skerrett, A. (2021). From Haiti to Detroit Through Black Immigrant Languages and Literacies. Journal of Literacy Research, 53(3), 406-429. Digital Publication/Abstract

• Omogun, L. (2021). Counterstories: Reimagining youth in multiethnic short story anthologies [Review of the book Black enough: Stories of being young & Black in America edited by I. Zoboi. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64 (5). Digital Publication/Abstract

• Skerrett, A. & Omogun, L. (2020). When racial, transnational, and immigrant identities and literacies meet: Black youth of Caribbean origin speak. Teachers College Record, 122 (13)

 

Django Paris

James A. & Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education
Director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice
College of Education, University of Washington

I am a Black educator and scholar born on Ohlone homelands in San Francisco, California to a White mother and a Black Jamaican father. I am honored to be the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington. My teaching and research focus on sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander students in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools. I am particularly concerned with educational and cultural justice and liberation as outcomes of inquiry and pedagogy.
Eagle Shield, A., Paris, D., Paris, R. & San Pedro, T. (Eds.). (2020). Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square . Routledge.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World . Teachers College Press.<\p>
Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (Eds.). (2013). Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. SAGE Publications.<\p>

Rae Paris

Associate Professor, Creative Writing
Department of English, University of Washington

I’m a Black womxn writer from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. My writing, research, teaching, and service is layered in land, memory, resistance, Indigenous, Black, and Brown futures, and love. My work is centered in the ways Black womxn have always been surveyors of our freedom and witnesses to terror; and far from being passive, the ways our witnessing is an active state of critical loving resistance. Dr. Erna Brodber’s creation of Black Space in Jamaica shapes my consideration of Black Spaces—on the page, in digital space, as well as in real time—Black Spaces as fugitive sites of joy, liberation, re-vision, and rememory. My book The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory, a collection of poetry, prose, and images, remembers my father’s life and death within an assemblage of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the settler colonial nation state of the United States. In my role as Assistant Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Washington, I teach graduate courses in the MFA program, as well as undergraduate courses. At UW, I organize the Lee Scheingold Lecture in Poetry and Poetics, which welcomes compelling and visionary creative writers/scholars whose work encourages us to think about poetry, poetics, and social justice critically and expansively. We are new to Seattle and I’m grateful to be here on Coast Salish homelands. I’m thankful for the many communities that have welcomed us, and I’m looking forward to joining with ongoing justice work that holds so many here right now, and across time and space.
Paris, Rae. The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017.
Paris, Rae. “Ballad of Negro Judah,” Killens Review of Arts and Letters (Fall/Winter 2016), 20-21.
Paris, Rae. “Strangled: Letter to a Young Black Poet,” Transition Magazine: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora 117 (April 2015), 6-7.
Paris, Rae. “An Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter.” Black Space, 2014.
Paris, Rae. “The Forgetting Tree,” themed issue “Race in America,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, June 15, 2013.

Maribel Santiago

Associate Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

My family oral histories cultivated my love for history, a love that I didn’t share for the school subject matter. K-12 history classrooms did little to help me make sense of my complex racial/ethnic realities as a chicana/zapoteca child of oaxaqueño mmigrants. These personal experiences, along with my time as a high school teacher, motivated me to explore the teaching and learning of race/ethnicity in K-12 history classrooms. Specifically, I consider how people in the U.S. collectively
remember the experiences of communities of color, and the consequences of such depictions. My current work centers on the production and consumption of Latinx social studies: how students, policy makers, and educators conceptualize Latinx experiences. As part of this effort I lead the History TALLER (pronounced tah-yĕr) research group dedicated to exploring the Teaching and Learning of Language, Ethnicity, and Race (TALLER).

Recent Publications

Santiago, M. (2019). Using historical inquiry to challenge the narrative of racial progress. Cognition and Instruction. 37(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2018.1539734
Santiago, M. (2019). Güeras, Indigenas y Negros: A framework for teaching Mexican American racial/ethnic histories. In M. Gross & L. Terra (Eds), Teaching and learning the difficult past: Comparative perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-and-Learning-the-Difficult-Past-Comparative-Perspectives/Gross-Terra/p/book/9781138087187
Santiago, M. (2019). From multicultural representation to romanticized stories: How contemporary context influences how we conceptualize Latinx school desegregation. Journal of Social Studies Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr.2019.04.004
Santiago, M. (2019). A framework for an interdisciplinary understanding of Mexican American school segregation. Multicultural Education Review. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2019.1615246

Niral Shah

Associate Professor, Learning Sciences & Human Development, College of Education, University of Washington

I am a Brown researcher and educator from the Chicago area, whose family immigrated to the United States from India. My work engages questions of racism, anti-racism, and learning. I am interested in how people come to learn anti-racism, and how race and racism organize learning environments, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I am co-developer of the EQUIP observation tool, which supports educators in identifying and attenuating patterns of bias in classroom participation. In my work, I pursue two goals in tandem: mitigating the harm experienced by students of color as they seek access to dominant forms of education, while also critiquing the limits of “access.” My vision is for all educators to be supported in making humanization the center of their teaching practice.
Shah, N., & Coles, J. A. (2020). Preparing teachers to notice race in classrooms: Contextualizing the competencies of preservice teachers with antiracist inclinations. Journal of Teacher Education.
Shah, N. (2019). “Asians are good at math” Is not a compliment: STEM success as a threat to personhood. Harvard Educational Review, 89(4), 661-686.

Manka Varghese

Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

I am dedicated to improving the education and life experiences of multilingual youth by focusing on understanding and re-envisioning the teaching and learning pathways of teachers of multilingual youth and of multilingual youth transitioning to postsecondary lives. In particular, I study the interaction between identity formation and multilingual learning and teaching and draw on critical perspectives, especially around the intersections of race and language. In doing so, I put forward an understanding of the historical and current terrain of multilingual youth as complex and rooted in racial, linguistic and other forms of inequity but with an eye to the possibilities of transformation. Currently, I am invested in partnering with teachers and organizations to reshape policies with more critical and complex understandings of youth and families also to advance the notion of education as a public good in a just and democratic society – nationally and globally.
Varghese, M. & Fuentes, R. (accepted). College capital and constraint agency:
First generation immigrant emergent bilingual students’ college success. Teachers College Record
Varghese, M., Daniels, J., & Park, C. (in press). Structuring disruption: Race-based caucuses in teacher education programs. To appear in Special issue: Preparing Asset, Equity, and Social Justice Oriented Teachers Within the Contemporary Political Challenges to University-based Teacher Education Programs. Teachers College Record.
2017-2022
Principal Investigator. U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition. Project Bilingual Educator Capacity (BECA): Preparing Spanish and Vietnamese Bilinguals in a Model Dual Language Teacher Education Program.

Shaneé A. Washington

Assistant Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

I am an African American mother, educator, and scholar from Queens, New York. My teaching and research center the scholarship, histories, cultures, educational experiences, and justice agendas of Black, Indigenous, and other historically and contemporarily marginalized peoples. My most recent research explored family-school-community (dis)engagement in one of the remaining Wampanoag communities of New England. Using Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, I sought to understand how
educators (public school teachers and administrators) and Wampanoag and other local Indigenous family and community members were conceptualizing and practicing family-school-community engagement and whether or not practices were aligned and culturally sustaining/revitalizing. I hope to expand this research to include other minoritized and marginalized families and communities of color while also seeking to understand ways that we as teacher educators can support aspiring and developing
teachers, leaders, and teacher educators to become culturally sustaining/revitalizing educators of Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized students who experience educational institutions as cultural and linguistic termination sites.

Joy Williamson-Lott

Professor
College of Education, University of Washington

In general, my work examines educational institutions as agencies of social change. I situate schools in the sociopolitical order and analyze how they have made a difference in society. My core historical work focuses on the role of higher education in the black freedom struggle and the transformation of American society between the late 1950s and early 1970s. A second strand of my work builds on this core historical work to consider ongoing issues of student learning, empowerment, and social justice in education. Both strands of my scholarship directly inform my teaching. Central to each of my classes is the belief that schools are contested sites and that various groups and individuals experience the same reality in different ways. My aim is to create students who think critically about multiple perspectives and are mindful of the consequences of the act of policy-making, curricular innovation, classroom teaching, or academic research.
Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018).
Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, “The Battle for Academic Freedom at Southern Institutions of Higher Education, 1955-1965,” Journal of Southern History 79 (November 2013), 879-920.
Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008).

Alayna Eagle Shield

Research Assistant (2019-2023), Banks Center for Educational Justice
College of Education, University of Washington

Mitákuyapi, Alayna Eagle Shield emáčiyapi. Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ Akíčita Háŋska-ta imáčaǧe. Húŋkpapȟa Malákȟóta, Isáŋyathi na Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ Damákȟota, na Pȟaláni hemáčha. (Hello my relatives, my name is Alayna Eagle Shield. I grew up in the Long Soldier District on the Standing Rock Nation. I am Tip of the Horn Lakota, Lives on Knives and Dwellers of the Sacred Lake Dakota, and Arikara). I am first and foremost Iná (mother) of two beautiful children, Tȟá Oníya Wakȟáŋ Wiŋ (Her Sacred Breath Woman) and Waaruxti Nataree’ux Tawisa (Blue Thunder Returns). I am married to a prayerful partner because it’s important that my partner agrees that our traditional life ways are always leading in our lives and the work we do together.
I have a rez education from home and an education in a mix of Tribal community college, state college and university settings. I am a reactivated language warrior and health promotion worker. Our traditional languages are the center of who we are as Indigenous people. Working as a Language Specialist for my tribe and as a Language Activities Instructor for our language immersion school has equipped me with the knowledge and tools to create language videos and training materials to better
share teachings and language with my people all over the world through social media and training settings. This has also impacted how I did work as the director for the Health Education Program on Standing Rock. I used language and traditions to guide my health promotion work. I am currently a Doctoral Student at the College of Education and a Research Assistant at the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. I serve on multiple boards and committees.
Mitákuye Owás’iŋ! (We’re all related)

Doua Kha

Research Assistant (2019-2021), Banks Center for Educational Justice
College of Education, University of Washington

I am currently a Doctoral student in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Washington-Seattle. My studies explore the intersection of race, gender, and sexual orientation among queer Asian American students in education. Prior to returning to grad school, I was a English/Language Arts high school teacher for several years. I am also a board member of the LGBTQ+ Gates Millennium Alumni Network, and have presented several workshops throughout the midwest about queer Asian American identities and allyship.

Jazmen Moore

Research Assistant (2018-2023), Banks Center for Educational Justice
College of Education, University of Washington

I am a doctoral student in the Multicultural Education program in the College of Education at the University of Washington-Seattle. Over the past five years, I taught high school ELA in and around Chicago. During this time, I also coordinated a spoken word club to facilitate a sustainable space for young people of color to share their stories, build community, and engage in arts-based activism. I am also an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and I serve on their Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English.
Invited Blog Post and Video, National Council of the Teachers of English, 11-10-17: “Rethinking Woke”
http://www2.ncte.org/blog/2017/11/rethinking-woke/

 Sciatta Padmore

Research Assistant (Present), Banks Center for Educational Justice
College of Education, University of Washington

I am currently a doctoral student in the Culturally Sustaining Education Program at the University of Washington-Seattle. Before my time at UW, I was a 9th and 10th grade teacher in Washington DC for four years. There, I had the privilege of developing and teaching rigorous ELA instruction for English Language Learners. Additionally, I have previously worked as a research assistant at Rutgers University, investigating and analyzing the interactions between teachers and students across racial lines. My research interests now revolve around how marginalized communities navigate their relationship to institutions of education and exercise their agency within those spaces.

Alejandra Pérez

Research Assistant (Present), Banks Center for Educational Justice, College of Education, University of Washington

My commitment to culturally sustaining education stems from my advocacy work with undocumented students and their families in Washington State. I have a background in community organizing, managing large-scale events and conferences, and providing professional development for educators. I served as Co-Director of the Beyond HB 1079 Conference, was a member of the Dream Educational Empowerment Program National Advisory Council, and worked as a community organizer with the Washington Dream Coalition. Throughout my career, I have led a multi-year professional learning and improvement network for hundreds of educators, focused on increasing direct postsecondary enrollment through anti-racism, shifting adult mindsets, and strengthening institutional support structures. Additionally, I co-founded the grassroots COVID-19 Relief Fund for Undocumented Individuals in Washington State and the Cultural Leadership Fellowship, a program for undocumented DACA recipients to travel abroad with Advance Parole. Born and raised in Guatemala, I moved to the United States at twelve years old. I graduated from Cleveland High School in Seattle, earned my Bachelor of Arts and Master of Education degrees from the University of Washington Bothell, and I am currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Culturally Sustaining Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. My research explores how undocumented organizers build critical coalitions and solidarity politics, the learning that takes place in organizing spaces, and how these values shape efforts to transform schools and communities.