Best Should Teach Keynote Speakers
For over 20 years, the Best Should Teach Awards Ceremony has included a keynote presentation from a distinguished invited educator.
2024-2025
Join us in the CASE Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium (4th Floor) on Thursday, May 1, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. MT for the Best Should Teach Lecture and Awards Ceremony followed by Keynote Alphonse Keasley. Please find more details about the 2025 event and our Gold Award Recipients in this event brochure.
Alphonse Keasley is a dynamic leader and our exciting keynote speaker! With over 30 years at CU Boulder, Alphonse has worn many hats—as a faculty member, staff member, and as Associate Vice Chancellor in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement.
Keasley began his career in higher education in 1971 as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University, where he taught courses in audiology, his original field of training and clinical practice. After arriving at CU Boulder in 1974 to pursue doctoral studies, he continued teaching in the Department of Communication Disorders—now known as Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences—where he led courses in Voice and Diction, auditory rehabilitation, and clinical practice at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Over his decades at CU Boulder, Keasley developed and taught numerous impactful courses, many of which he personally designed to address evolving student needs and deepen engagement with issues of diversity, inclusion, and global awareness. He launched CU’s first successful Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, teaching its summer research course from 1995 into the early 2000s. He also created and taught the Honors Program course Diversity and Inclusion: Democracy for the 21st Century from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.
Among his most cherished teaching experiences was the August Wilson course, developed in collaboration with the Department of Ethnic Studies. The course remains a favorite among alumni who continue to share memories and reflections with him. In 2007, Keasley was selected by CU’s Study Abroad Office to design an international course, which took students to South Africa to explore the philosophy of Ubuntu. Though the course formally ran for three years, he continued traveling with small groups of students—supporting their research journeys by covering most of their travel costs with funds earned through unpaid teaching engagements.
Today, Keasley continues to contribute to CU Boulder’s educational community through the Leadership Studies Minor, where he teaches as needed and mentors aspiring scholars, performers, and leaders. His passion for teaching, mentoring, and creating inclusive, transformative learning experiences remains undiminished.
For this year’s Best Should Teach Ceremony, keynote speaker Keasley will reflect on his extensive experience in higher education and his involvement with national organizations focused on diversity and student engagement. Drawing on his personal journey as both an administrator and educator, Keasley will explore the valuable lessons learned from his work with programs like the Pre-Collegiate Development Program and the National Survey of Student Engagement. He will use the lens of historian Patty Limerick's approach—"Turning Hindsight into Foresight"—to discuss the challenges of today and the future, and share insights on how we can better support marginalized students in navigating an ever-changing landscape of education. With a focus on inclusion, family involvement, and high-impact practices, Keasley will highlight the importance of transformative education in the face of adversity.
2024
Kevin Gannon's talk, Is It Time to Change Your Mind?, covered how might we (re)connect with our agency, and use it to anchor our practices in an ethic of hope. This talk suggested specific places to start, and offered strategies to identify and critique the assumptions we bring to teaching. Kevin Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.
2022-2023
What to do when you don’t know what to do: Teaching for equity and justice on days after.
Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Director of Teacher Education for the Neag School of Education and an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction
2021
This Best Should Teach awards ceremony included 2020 and 2021 awardees. The ceremony was invitation only to minimize contact. Awardees took turns speaking at the event as they received their awards. There was no guest speaker for this event.
2020
In 2020, the Best Should Teach awards ceremony was postponed due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
2019
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
Bettina L. Love, Associate Professor of Educational Theory & Practice, the University of Georgia
2018
Habits of the Mind: Global Approaches to Teaching and Learning
Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University
2017
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Classroom
Thomas Cech, Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Professor, and Director of CU's BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder
2016
Using the Tools of Critical Race Theory and Racial Microaggressions to Examine Everyday Racism in and out of the Classroom
Daniel Solórzano, Professor of Social Science & Comparative Education, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
2015
The Republic of Imagination: Humanities & the Future of Democracies
Azar Nafisi, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University
2014
The Best Should Research Teaching: Impacts of Physics Education Research
Steven Pollock, Professor, Physics; Carnegie Professor of the Year
2013
One Big Sandbox
Elisa Villanueva Beard, Co-CEO, Teach for America
2012
“Getting Serious” About Education: Cultivating Culturally Relevant Teachers for New Century Students
Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011
The Best Should Teach Legacy
Philip P. DiStefano, Chancellor, University of Colorado Boulder
2010
Science and the World’s Future
Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief, Science magazine
2009
The Pedagogical Imagination: Teaching toward Possibility
Kris Gutiérrez, Provost’s Chair, School of Education
2008
Why the Best Should Teach: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility
Donna Dickenson, Emeritus Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of London
2007
Save the World on Your Own Time
Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law, College of Law, Florida International University
2006
The Role of Teaching in Countering Social Inequality
Pedro Noguera, Professor, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University & Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education
2005
Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science (and a Lot of Other Subjects)
Carl Weiman, Professor, Physics
2004
The Less Teaching, the More Learning, and Other Lessons from the Radical Past
Martin Bickman, Professor, English, CU-Boulder
2003
Twins Separated at Birth: the Reunion of the Sciences and the Humanities
Patricia Limerick, Professor, History & Environmental Studies and Chair of the Board & Faculty Director for the Center of the American West
2002
A New Faculty for the New American Century: Challenges and Opportunities
Orlando Taylor, Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University
2001
Teaching Science in the 21st Century
Margaret Murnane, Professor, Physics
2000
Teaching Because Democracy Matters
Walter Parker, University of Washington
1999
Where Love & Need Are One: A New Day for Teaching
Eugene Rice, Director for the Forum on Faculty Roles & Rewards, American Association for Higher Education