Equity

While teaching in elementary and middle schools serving largely minoritized communities for more than a decade, Shaneé Washington-Wangia felt a constant, at times desperate, desire to see her students thrive in an educational system that wasn’t structured for their success.

More than 120 future teachers shared their work building lessons that contain tribal-specific content, land-based pedagogy and engagement with Native communities during an August 13 showcase at the University of Washington College of Education. 

Before joining the University of Washington’s multicultural education program, doctoral student Jazmen Moore was an English language arts teacher and a spoken word coach and coordinator in Chicago.

Her students, most being students of color and possessing amazing stories to share with the world, inspired her to become a better educator.

Django Paris, director of the University of Washington’s Banks Center for Educational Justice, will serve as editor of a new book series on culturally sustaining pedagogies recently announced by Teachers College Press.

Far too often, high-achieving underrepresented students graduate from high school and end up attending colleges that don’t offer learning opportunities commensurate with their academic profiles and potential.

This phenomenon, known as “undermatch,” results in more high-achieving minority students attending institutions with lower completion rates and can reduce these underrepresented students’ opportunities to realize their dreams and close persistent wealth gaps between different populations. 

The University of Washington’s Banks Center for Educational Justice will host Distinguished Summer Scholar Sandy Grande, a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship, who will teach the course “Black and Indigenous Theories of Education Liberation and Resurgence.”

Grande, the author of “Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought,” is a professor and director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College.