Ed Taylor UW Speaker Referral

Ed Taylor

Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs
Associate Professor, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies

As part of an ongoing series, the College of Education will be profiling its faculty members, asking each of them the same set of questions. Loosely based on the Proust questionnaire, these questions are intended to provide brief views on a variety of topics. This interview features Ed Taylor. His areas of teaching and research include history of higher education, policies and programs servicing disenfranchised groups in secondary and post-secondary settings, and the construction of race-based policy.

Question: What moved you to become a teacher/researcher?

Answer: My freshman year in high school I was a part of a program under the Carter administration that created working opportunities for low income youth—I was one of them. I was given a job reading to low income, minority kindergarten and first grade kids in an elementary school, so I worked most afternoons while I was in high school. Even then, I knew that I wanted to work somewhere at the intersection between schools and communities. The funding for this program was cut within a few months, but I kept doing the work. I volunteered there during high school, and in college I would go back to visit the school and the kids—here is where I gained a sense of the importance of schools in multiracial communities.

Question: What teacher had the greatest impact on your life?

Answer: I’ve had a number of teachers that have left a powerful legacy with me. Mr. Cleese was a dynamic sixth grade teacher who spent a lot of time in the neighborhood and the community. He knew a lot about us, and for those of us that lived complicated lives, he managed to expect more. He made sure that our work was public, and he was the first teacher to give me an academic award. He gave me the outstanding student award, a little trophy with winged angels that I still have to this day. It was the first and last academic award I would get, and I remember him for that.

The second person that I think was inspirational is Elizabeth Cole, a statistics professor at Gonzaga University. She’s one of the first teachers I met when I went to college, and she taught one of the toughest courses that I had ever taken. She embodied both a toughness and high expectation along with a deep sense of compassion, and she stayed with me when other people would have given up. So twenty-some years later I wrote an email to her, thanking her for her persistence. She is now a member the Sisters of Providence, and so I think her capacity to be patient and her faith have served her well over the years.

Question: If you could embark now on any adequately funded research project, what would it be?

Answer: It would have something to do with understanding schooling, teaching, learning, and leadership in South Africa during the first 10 years into their democracy. I would be honored and interested to be involved in a project that looked at the transition and transformation of schools, and lives of kids in those schools, over the next 10 years. They’re on the precipice of something very important in their communities and in their schools, and the schools will be the engine for major societal change. The educators there are doing their work very quietly, but they’re true freedom fighters, and remarkable people. I would tell that story if I had adequate funding.

Question: If you knew now that you could write only one more book/article in your career, what would the title be?

Answer: I don’t know what the title would be, but the book would have something to do with legacies. I’m interested in this concept of legacy. It comes in part from watching my colleagues here, watching leaders in communities, watching people do their work, and over the course of time, watching how people have impacted me, and how institutions themselves have influenced and impacted me. I’m interested in what it is we remember about those people and what it is that lasts. What is it that leaders and average citizens do that carries over time? So I would write about what it means to leave a legacy. I think about my colleagues Ken Sirotnik and Jim Clowes, who passed away last year. They both lived meaningful lives, and both of them leave me thinking about legacy—what it means to live a meaningful and impressionable life.

Question: What qualities do you most admire in your professional colleagues?

Answer: I have great respect for my colleagues. This is a community that carries a deep commitment to teaching and learning, research, and to improving opportunities to learn and access education. In some way, nearly everyone here is doing some work that is guided by equity and justice. There is something special about being a member of a College of Education and something special about this collection of colleagues.

Question: What book should be read by all who would become teachers?

Answer: It’s hard for me to give titles, but I can describe what I think these books should do. I don’t necessarily know what they should say, because I think one would have to choose the content, but I know that the books that I would want educators to read are the ones that move you in some way. Toni Morrison makes the distinction between being touched and being moved. I would hope that all educators have a book somewhere by their bedside or on a bookshelf that moves them. For me personally, there are a handful of books that have either inspired me, or have brought me to tears, or perplexed me, and that impact has lasted for a long time. I keep them close.

Question: What trends and ideas from the popular culture will have an impact on education over the next ten years?

Answer: I don’t know if trend is the best term, but I’m particularly interested in the voice and position of young people, particularly young urban youth. I think that the music and the voices that seem to move them have a level of critique that is powerful and not always easy to hear. But I think as educators we really have to understand this critical voice. It cuts across race and has a lot to say about the current conditions for young people in this country - about their beliefs about relationships, and about whether they’re being heard and responded to. There’s a toughness and seriousness and intensity to it, that is well worth listening to closely.

Question: What recent findings or insights about education do you believe will still be significant 30 years from now?

Answer: The findings I worry about and attend to the most are not recent. My work is often about the social context of school - about race and identity and the politics that shape race identity and shape policies. That social-historical context is an ever-present conversation and I’m not sure that it changes much over time. So I think the conflicts around race and class and identity have always been with us in multiple forms, and I think they will continue to be with us. They are cyclical in nature and worthy of investigation and education. Education is a venue to bring public attention to important issues as they play themselves out in schools, and as some of them get resolved in schools.

Question: What things about the current state of education give you hope?

Answer: I’m very hopeful. In middle school I was the president of the Junior Optimists Club, and part of my job was to look for goodness and hope in school, in particular. So what gives me hope is that schools will always be about committed adults and inspired kids who are worthy of our best struggle. What gives me hope are my encounters with parents every day who have trust and faith in the system, irrespective of its flaws. I have the opportunity to see people who have been successful in the system, even if it’s just a handful, who are contributing back to the community in meaningful and profound ways.