Advancing Educational Justice

Faculty Q&A with Professor Ann Ishimaru

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:58:21 +0000

Faculty Q&A with Professor Ann Ishimaru

December 19, 2023

As the newly appointed Kerry and Linda Killinger Endowed Chair in Diversity Studies, Professor Ann Ishimaru looks forward to continuing her work convening collaborative spaces of research and inquiry to advance educational justice in our schools and communities. Next month, Ishimaru and a dedicated committee of UW scholars, alumni and staff — including Professor of Practice and Director of the Leadership for Learning Program Anthony Craig and Teaching Professor and Director of the Danforth Educational Leadership Program Ann O'Doherty — will host the inaugural Leading Towards Justice Symposium on January 19-20, 2024 in the Husky Union Building. The symposium will build on the Leading Towards Justice Series begun in 2022, and invites scholars, practitioners, educators and leaders to share their work and evolve our collective leadership practices of justice-seeking in education.

Learn more about the symposium and Professor Ishimaru’s vision for educational justice in our Q&A with her. Please note that responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The symposium asks participants to engage the question, “How do we lead towards justice within these territories?” Can you elaborate on this central question and its criticality in the work you and your colleagues do?

This question really emerged not only from my own research, teaching and partnerships, but also the work that many of us do at the ��ߺ��, as we seek to grow and support the leadership of our students in their schools, systems and communities. We know that leadership is crucial in efforts to disrupt longstanding racial and intersecting inequities in educational systems. But disruption alone is insufficient; leading towards justice calls us to set our sights beyond the system as we know it and towards realizing futures that are “answerable” (as Leigh Patel would say) to young people, families and communities and to the knowledge and learning on these Indigenous lands, in particular.

For ourselves and our students, that means developing ongoing, sustained relationships with communities, especially those systematically marginalized or erased. It means discarding heroic, individualistic approaches to leadership and instead moving collectively and relationally with others in the challenging work of fostering well-being and wholeness for young people and the adults who support them. And it means transforming systems and our own practices towards more expansive visions of the possible.

The symposium will feature a keynote conversation with scholars Michelle Jacob, Dana Nickson and Betina Hsieh. Why is it important to create spaces for collaborative conversations through this keynote as well as throughout the symposium?

We refer to this collective engagement as an “un-keynote” because we wanted to provide a platform for these three scholars that does justice to their brilliance while also enabling them to model the collective knowledge-building and change-making we see as core to the work of leadership. We deliberately invited scholars whose work seeks to realize justice in these territories, because leading is always contextual and because we wanted to push back on the notion that expertise resides solely in luminaries from afar — lucky for us, they are right here!

Dr. Jacob, a member of the Yakama Nation, traces her leadership and educational work around Indigenous well-being on these lands back to her ancestors since time immemorial. Dr. Nickson, who has taught in the ��ߺ�� since 2020, will bring her scholarship on Black student and family knowledges, geographies and placemaking into the conversation. Meanwhile, Dr. Hsieh will have just arrived at the UW as the new Boeing Endowed Chair of Teacher Education, and we are delighted to introduce her to our community and can’t wait to witness the synergies between her work in teacher identity, teachers of color and critical digital literacies with the work of the other two scholars. We feel that the very act of bringing these scholars and aunties together to share knowledge and space with each other and with us is an act of critical hope in this moment.

What do you and your co-organizers hope participants will contribute to the symposium as well as learn and take with them to their communities?

Our committee has been very intentional about ensuring that this symposium is not a typical talking-heads conference with a couple of “experts” lecturing behind a podium. Rather, we have designed the symposium with the presumption that everyone brings crucial expertise to the challenging work of transforming education. Thus, participants will learn with facilitators and have opportunities to interact, move, connect, remember, bear witness, imagine — and cultivate joy amid times of enormous challenge and weight. The concurrent sessions will be led by current Leadership for Learning Ed.D. students on topics as broad-ranging as student voice, restorative practices, Indigenous knowledge in schools, humanizing data, justice in instructional leadership, BIPOC women in leadership, Theater of the Oppressed, transforming state agencies, and inquiries into identity, well-being and vulnerability in leadership.

Thanks to Collective Liberation in Practice and Franklin Elementary School Principal Constance Daw, we are also delighted to screen elementary student-created films centered on narratives of Black liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty that connect educational justice to food, housing, creativity, land, water and language.

Through our collective learning, we hope to catalyze a sustained network of leaders that weaves across our different degrees, certifications and programs to build community and solidarities between current students, alumni, faculty, educators, youth and community members.

As the newly appointed Kerry and Linda Killinger Endowed Chair in Diversity Studies, what is your vision for the College’s advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion and how do you imagine leveraging your position to support it?

I want to deeply appreciate the first and original holder of this chair, Professor Emeritus James A. Banks. His work has been so influential across all of education — I think many of us can quite easily say that without his and his Center’s work for decades, our own work would not be possible. It is a credit to James and Cherry Banks’ profound (and ongoing!) contributions that the field continues to evolve as we work to transform and realize more just educational systems. I look forward to continuing that legacy by leveraging this chair to support the Just Educational Leadership Institute’s work of cultivating cross-racial leadership and solidarities in our communities and schools — a vital effort especially as external political forces seek to undermine or suppress equity-focused learning, dialogue and change. Thanks to the ��ߺ��’s collective of leadership programs, the Corbally Fund, and Kerry and Linda Killinger, the Leading Towards Justice Symposium is one of the ways that legacy is already bearing fruit!

Anything else you’d like to add?

If you are a student, educator, or community member who cares about education and the role of leadership in catalyzing more just schools, we hope you’ll join us! The symposium is an unparalleled opportunity to explore what our multiple leadership programs have to offer and to learn and grow community in this work.

The Leading Towards Justice Symposium is hosted by the ��ߺ��’s Danforth Educational Leadership Program, Leadership for Learning Program and the Educational Foundations, Leadership and Policy area with support from the Corbally Fund and the Just Ed Leadership Institute. Register for the symposium here.

The Kerry and Linda Killinger Endowed Chair in Diversity Studies will ensure the ��ߺ�� maintains its national prominence in diversity studies, multicultural education and community-centric research to advance educational equity in Washington state and beyond. Established through a gift from The Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation, this endowment permanently sustains the College’s capacity to recruit and retain national luminaries and advances efforts to diversify the College’s faculty body. Additionally, the endowment continues the legacy of impact begun by “the father of multicultural education” Professor Emeritus James A. Banks and will unite and lead efforts across the College related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Contact

Charleen Wilcox

Director for Marketing & Communications

wilcoxc@uw.edu

High Tech Meets High Touch

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:34:48 +0000

High Tech Meets High Touch

Published

September 18, 2019

Paraprofessionals do vital work but lack access to professional development. Researchers at the ��ߺ��'s Haring Center for Inclusive Education are taking a novel approach to make coaching more available to educators.

Let's do this together

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:33:07 +0000

Let's do this together

Published

September 18, 2018

Centering the lifeways and very lives of communities denied educational justice will be the focus of the ��ߺ��'s Banks Center for Educational Justice. Professor Django Paris, the inaugural director of the center, discusses the promise of advancing educational justice.

Driving diversity with data

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:31:28 +0000

Driving diversity with data

Published

September 13, 2019

In Seattle Public Schools, strengthening support for first-year teachers is an essential element of diversifying its workforce, with research assistance from the ��ߺ�� ߺ��. First-year teacher Halle Mahlik and her mentor Lana Sumner, along with Professor Min Sun, discuss the school district's Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program and the importance of supporting teachers of color who are entering the profession.

Principals Matter

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:30:01 +0000

Principals Matter

Published

January 19, 2020

The ��ߺ�� Center for Educational Leadership's Max Silverman and Joanna Michelson discuss how the center partnered with Blaine School District to develop a shared vision for instructional improvement, equip Blaine’s instructional leaders with tools to aid teachers in their professional growth and more.

Piecing together the puzzle | A conversation about literacy and intellectual disability

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:28:05 +0000

Piecing together the puzzle | A conversation about literacy and intellectual disability

Published

September 18, 2020

��ߺ�� ߺ�� Professor Roxanne Hudson, Research Assistant Ali Wilhelm, and Down Syndrome Community of Puget Sound Vice President Alison Burchett discuss their involvement in The Reading Development Project. Through this project, UW ��ߺ�� researchers are partnering with families and school districts in Washington state to better understand the ways in which students with intellectual disability learn to read.

Unite:Ed alliance | Advancing educational opportunities for underserved communities together

alxbclrk@washington.edu — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 23:19:40 +0000

Unite:Ed alliance | Advancing educational opportunities for underserved communities together

Published

September 18, 2020

The ��ߺ��’s ��ߺ�� commitment to create authentic and impactful relationships with community partners, tribes and school districts led to the creation of the College’s Unite:Ed alliance. Established in 2017, Unite:Ed brings together families, community leaders, practicing educators and researchers in long-term collaborations to co-design solutions to the issues that matter to our partners. This effort is strengthening justice-oriented research practice partnerships with the goal of advancing educational opportunities for historically underserved and marginalized communities.

Truth and Excellence: Teachers bringing their best

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 03:45:10 +0000

Truth and Excellence: Teachers bringing their best

January 17, 2023

As part of a team-building activity at the start of the school year, students in Carlos Garcia's fifth-grade classroom create posters with positive affirmations about bilingual education.

"I am a role model, a leader, a father figure," says Antonio "Tone" Morton, a Cleveland High School special education teacher.

"I can create a classroom where people love being," says Will Powell, a resource teacher at Chief Sealth International High School.

“I have a passion for dual language education and a love for teaching social studies." says Carlos Garcia, a fifth-grade teacher at a Spanish-English dual-language school in the Bellevue School District. “It is important for students to learn from multiple perspectives and get the full story when learning about our history.”

"Leading is like having a buffet of food. What is it you need? Let's eat together, let's grow together," says Salvador Gomez, who teaches Spanish and culture to middle schoolers in the Highline School District.

Morton and Powell completed a master's in education in UW’s Special Education Teacher Education Program (TEP) and Garcia and Gomez completed a master’s in teaching in UW’s Elementary Education TEP program. In addition to influencing and inspiring students in the classroom, these leader-educators also changed the TEP programs for the better.

Welcoming, Hearing, Seeing

When Powell was a sophomore in high school, he finally had a class he loved. It was a Spanish class, and it wasn't easy. "I felt respected," he says. "I enjoyed the environment. The teacher had high expectations." It made him imagine what school could have been like for him and his friends if they had felt seen and valued in all their classes.

"I was put on this earth to motivate them," Morton says of his work with young people after describing being supported at home but doubted at school. When he ran after-school programs, enrolling hundreds of students, a teacher encouraged him to go further. "She saw more in me than I saw in myself," he says. First, he became a paraeducator, helping kids who struggled to understand math. Then he connected with the Academy for Rising Educators (ARE), going on to UW so he could do more. "I'm connecting resources, building relationships, making change and changing the narrative," says Morton.

By unapologetically coming into spaces, being ourselves and still using slang, showing a different perception of what it means to be a teacher, it switches the trajectory of what students can do with their own lives.

"There's just not many teachers like us," says Powell. "By unapologetically coming into spaces, being ourselves and still using slang, showing a different perception of what it means to be a teacher, it switches the trajectory of what students can do with their own lives."

Gomez describes his desire to break free of assumptions about trauma being the same across racial and ethnic groups. He's also tired of so much emphasis on narratives of oppression and wants more focus on the many ways people are growing and prospering in community. "Leading doesn't mean I need to lead the discussion," he says. "I like to get to the core of being a human being with people. If we aren't okay emotionally, we're not going to be able to progress as a community."

After feeling like people were always making assumptions about him and his abilities in school, Garcia eagerly gives his students something different. "This month, I've been pushing my students to think critically about everything and to think about the conversation and who it impacts," he says. "There are different ways we can help one another."

Taking Care of the Teachers

It's precisely this intelligence, life experience, empathy, schooling, and wisdom that all students need in their teachers. Now, they need it even more, after the long pandemic years, meeting the moment and imagining how they might lead into the future. Like the stories of Morton, Powell, Garcia and Gomez, research shows that students thrive when they can see themselves in and relate to their teachers. But the teachers themselves also need support.

To attract, train and keep educators who reflect the demographics and needs of students requires attending to many parts in a complex system. Programs certifying teachers must be accessible through recruitment and affordability. Once candidates enter a program, they need relevant materials and welcoming faculty and classmates. When teachers become certified, there is also the piece of feeling welcome and having support in the educational settings where they work. Then the cycle must repeat and grow with more students seeing the pathway open before them as they become inspired to teach.

Salvador Gomez poses for a selfie with his students.

Initial funding has helped to further many of these efforts in the UW TEP programs. While a recruitment specialist position is still open, Gwen Sweeney serves as the teacher candidate retention and support specialist. In 2020, the first cohort of 16 students received full-tuition scholarships as Diversifying the Educator Workforce (DEW) Fellows. Having graduated from the Special Education program more than fifteen years ago, Sweeney has a unique perspective. "I can see transformation," she says. “We’re not where we want to be yet, but we’re definitely different from 2005.”

Sweeney describes how the TEP programs are shorter than many degree programs but more intense. Her job is to normalize support and resources, meeting students' needs from applying to paying to attending. "How do we better set up folks for success early on?" she asks. "Directors can change the format or structure of a class, spread the class into two quarters if a lot of students need more time, address issues with financial aid, layer upon layer of systems that we have to keep chipping away and changing how things work."

How do we better set up folks for success early on?

Another critical piece is partnering with other institutions. Seattle Public Schools ARE collaborates with the City of Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning (DEEL) to identify high school seniors and recent graduates, staff, and community members who may want to teach. Suppose these candidates commit to teaching for four years in SPS. In that case, the program pays for their tuition and teacher certification at Central Washington University, City University, North Seattle College, Seattle Central College and the ��ߺ��. Additionally, all these programs have the potential to work together in their support and funding options as students advance toward their goals in various programs of study.

The cohort model in classes is also crucial, so the students have a network of supportive colleagues. With more students of color comes a more dynamic environment and more feedback. "For me, as a Black student, when I was with only one or two other Black students in a class, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up honestly about my experiences," says Sweeney. “We will get more feedback as we have larger groups of students with under-represented identities."

Mentoring is another way to increase networks of support. Garcia's principal asked him if he would become a mentor after his third year of teaching, and he's continued since then. "I love it," he says. "The student I mentored last year is now a 4th-grade teacher here. It's nice because I can help future educators and also help dual language teachers better their practice."

Next Generation Rising

Dual language is another area with lots of planned growth in the coming years. Since 2017, the UW's Elementary Teacher Education program (ELTEP) has credentialed more than 50 bilingually endorsed teachers. Associate Teaching Professor Teddi Beam-Conroy emphasizes the importance of dual language in preparing educators committed to racial and linguistic justice.

Beam-Conroy’s leadership on behalf of UW at the state level has influenced an initiative recently announced by State Superintendent Chris Reykdal to increase the number of dual language teachers so that all K-8 Washington students have access to dual language education by 2040. This commitment continues investments to expand the dual language workforce and dual language programs made by the Washington State Legislature since 2015.

Gomez wants to break any existing ideas of what a dual language teacher should or shouldn't be. He remembers a time in school when Spanish language teachers would ask students only to speak Spanish — solo Español. But he also had the experience in elementary school of a teacher saying that he couldn't speak Spanish.

As a teacher, Gomez embraces the cultural richness that comes from being first-generation or fifth-generation and speaking multiple languages or mixing them in new ways. "Sometimes we have 5 to 10 minutes of Spanglish, or Viet-English, or Vietnamese, Spanish and English. That's what it is to bring your culture into the classroom, getting to be you and figuring out who you are in the process," he says.

In Garcia’s district, dual language classrooms are taught in a 50-50% model. The program is very intentional in forming classes with half native Spanish speakers and half non-native speakers, with an emphasis on supporting multilingual learners. The focus in these classrooms is on learning grade level content while also bridging both languages and building students sociocultural competence. “My students have been doing a wonderful job with that,” he says.

In all of this, there's the sense that some things are changing, but there's still so much to do. Morton and Powell talk about navigating the many challenges. Powell mentions that he has 27 students on his Individualized Education Program (IEP) caseload, making it difficult to support them in the ways he wants to. Morton explains that there wasn’t enough time to collaborate and build a relationship with his co-teacher. “I also have a huge IEP caseload with 25 students, which makes it difficult with co-teaching,” he says. “Teachers need to understand each other’s teaching style to serve each student to the best of our abilities.”

It's the job of programs like TEP, with people in positions like Sweeney’s, to continue to listen and evolve and share the load of making real a future equal to the hard work and excellence these leaders bring and the next generation they inspire.

"I feel like when we were coming up, we saw the teacher as the all-knowing," says Powell. "What I love about this generation is they are so much more outspoken. I tell them I don't have all the answers. I'm learning from you all."

Contact

Charleen Wilcox

Director for Marketing & Communications

wilcoxc@uw.edu