Features

A new name, a new director and a new book celebrate the inauguration of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington this October.

For teachers, professional development is too often an exercise of sitting, listening and taking in information from an expert—though rarely another classroom teacher.

Teachers from several Puget Sound elementary schools, however, are working to create a new model in which they take charge of their own professional learning. This July, a group of approximately 20 teacher fellows came together to explore how project-based learning can transform the classroom and plan how they’ll build their practice around student inquiry throughout the coming school year.

As a student at Tacoma's Lincoln High School, Dylan Tran expected his Advanced Placement World History course to provide him with multiple stories and perspectives of human history. But from the first page of the textbook, he felt like something critical was missing.

After looking over the list of authors, Tran noticed the ten authors were all white and seven were male. And, over the course of the year, Tran remembers that most of the course topics were focused on the experiences of whites in Europe and the United States.

In his first year as a teacher in Arizona, University of Washington PhD student Lin Wu struggled to make genuine connections with his Mexican American students.

As a first-generation immigrant from China, Wu had personally experienced the challenges that accompany being accepted by U.S. mainstream culture. Unaware of the historical struggles that Chinese immigrants faced in the U.S., Wu found that he had suddenly become the “other.” It was this othering experience that initially prevented Wu from seeing beyond his own struggles.