For over 20 years, the Best Should Teach awards ceremony has included a keynote presentation from a distinguished invited educator.
2022-2023
Join us in the UMC Glenn Miller Ballrooms on May 1, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. for the Best Should Teach Lecture and Awards Ceremony followed by Keynote Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, NEAG School of Education, University of Connecticut
Dr. Dunn, will deliver her talk on responding to violence in schools, “What to do when you don’t know what to do: Teaching for equity and justice on days after."
What do educators do in their classrooms the day after a tragic or traumatic event? How do they attend to their students’ needs while teaching for equity and justice? Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education, has made this a focus of her work as a teacher and a scholar. In her book Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice, Dunn examines examples of days after that teachers remember, including 9/11, elections, natural disasters, gun violence, police brutality, social uprisings, Supreme Court decisions, immigration policies, and more. She also shares examples of days after that K–12 and college-aged students remember, including what their teachers did and didn’t do and how they experienced these moments. Her talk will highlight equity and justice-focused pedagogical approaches that can be used to support current classroom teachers and to help preservice teachers think ahead to their future classrooms. Dunn’s talk will provide useful and thought-provoking guidance for educators and educational personnel in a variety of educational contexts at all levels who navigate these very difficult and all-too-frequent days after.
Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn is the Director of Teacher Education for the Neag School of Education and an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction. A former high school English teacher, Dr. Dunn now focuses her teaching, research, and service on urban education for social and racial justice. She studies how to best prepare and support teachers to work in urban schools and how to teach for justice and equity amidst school policies and reforms that negatively impact teachers’ working conditions and students’ learning conditions. Prior to coming to UConn, she was an Associate Professor at Michigan State University and an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice (Teachers College Press, 2021); Teachers Without Borders?: The Hidden Consequences of International Teachers in U.S. Schools (Teachers College Press, 2013); and Urban Teaching in America (Sage Publications, 2011) . She has published dozens of articles in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education. A committed public scholar, she has been a contributor to the Huffington Post and National Public Radio. Among other awards, Dr. Dunn is the winner of the Critical Educators for Social Justice Revolutionary Mentor Award from the American Educational Research Association and Michigan State University’s Teacher-Scholar of the Year Award.