Teaching for Black Lives: A Keynote Event with Wayne Au and Dyan Watson

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The College of Education will host an interactive keynote, "Teaching for Black Lives," on Thursday, Feb. 27 at 4:30 p.m., in the Carney Family Auditorium.

In this presentation, Dyan Watson and Wayne Au, two of the editors of “Teaching for Black Lives,” will discuss their book and the overall project of making black lives matter in schools.

This event includes a discussion between Watson and Au, a classroom activity and an audience question and answer session followed by a book signing and reception.

A former public high school teacher, Au is a professor in the School of Educational Studies and currently serves as the dean of diversity and equity for the University of Washington Bothell (UWB). He is a long-time editor for the social justice teaching magazine, “Rethinking Schools,” and his work focuses on both academic and public scholarship about high-stakes testing, charter schools, teaching for social justice and anti-racist education. Recently, Au has been working in the Seattle area to support the Black Lives Matter campaign and ethnic studies in Seattle schools and surrounding districts. His recent books include “Rethinking Ethnic Studies,” co-edited with Tolteka Cuahatin, Miguel Zavala, and Christine Sleeter; “Teaching for Black Lives,” co-edited with Dyan Watson and Jesse Hagopian; “A Marxist Education;” and “Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of the U.S. Curriculum,” co-authored with Anthony Brown and Dolores Calderon. He was honored with the UWB Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015, given the William H. Watkins award for scholar activism from the Society of Professors of Education in 2017, and was honored with the Distinguished K-12 Educational Leader Award from the Evergreen State College MiT program in 2019.

Watson teaches at the Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling in Portland, Oregon. She teaches methods classes for pre-service social studies teachers, research methods classes for doctoral students and researches how race mediates teaching. Watson began her professional career teaching math and writing for young mothers working on their GEDs in Portland, Oregon. She taught social studies at the high school level in a suburb of Portland before pursuing her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Watson is an editor for “Rethinking Schools,” and the author of “‘Urban but not too urban’: Unpacking Teachers' Desires to Teach Urban Students,” “Norming suburban: How teachers talk about race without using race words” and “A Letter from a Black Mom to Her Son;” as well as the co-editor of “Teaching for Black Lives;” “Rethinking Elementary Education;” and “Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice.”