Insurgent Social Studies

A former public high school teacher, Wayne Au is a Professor in the School of Educational Studies and is currently serving as the Dean of Diversity & Equity for the University of Washington Bothell. 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, Dr. Au has been working in the Seattle area to support Black Lives Matter and Ethnic Studies in Seattle Schools and surrounding districts. His recent books include Rethinking Ethnic Studies (co-edited with Tolteka Cuahatin, Miguel Zavala, & Christine Sleeter, 2019), Teaching for Black Lives (co-edited with Dyan Watson and Jesse Hagopian, 2018), A Marxist Education (2018) and Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of the U.S. Curriculum (coauthored with Anthony Brown and Dolores Calderon, 2016). 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.

Dr. Sarah B. Shear is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Multicultural Education at the University of Washington-Bothell. She earned her doctorate in Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum from the University of Missouri in 2014 with concentrations in social studies education and Indigenous studies. Dr. Shear examines K-12 social studies curriculum within Indigenous contexts, as well as race/ism and settler colonialism in K-12 social studies teacher education, popular media, and qualitative methodologies. As a member of the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective, Dr. Shear is committed to collective action to combat oppression in education and academia. She and colleagues are published in Theory and Research in Social Education; Journal of Social Studies Research; Knowledge Cultures, Social Studies and the Young Learner; and Qualitative Inquiry. In addition, Dr. Shear co-edited (Re)Imagining Elementary Social Studies: A Controversial Issues Reader (2018) and Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies Education (2020). Dr. Shear and colleagues have presented their collaborative work at the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies (CUFA-NCSS), American Educational Research Association (AERA), International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). These efforts have also been featured by the Zinn Project, Teaching Tolerance, Huffington Post, and several other media outlets. In addition, Dr. Shear has been a featured speaker at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Natasha Hakimali Merchant is Assistant Professor of Social Studies and Multicultural Education at the University of Washington Bothell where she teaches courses in equity, critical diversity, and education. Natasha's research interests focus on how othered-bodies are taught in social studies curricula.