Leanne Taylor, Faculty of Education

Leanne Taylor’s teaching is situated in the area of social justice, equity and activism in education and spans undergraduate, teacher education, and graduate levels. With this grounding, she also believes in educational leadership that ‘makes space’ for difference, inspires new ideas, and prioritizes voices that are not always at the table. Her philosophy is guided by a belief that good teaching must always start where students are at and work to generate opportunities for growth and change long after students leave our course.

By emphasizing the process of ‘unlearning’, she works to inspire change and build critical capacity among her students. She employs a range of methods, including daily equity habit-building activities and multimedia methods (e.g. memes, photo-based assignments and popular culture analyses) to generate questions that nudge students past their comfort zones toward their ‘learning edge’.

By refusing to get overly comfortable in her teaching, Leanne regularly draws on emerging scholarship and student feedback to re-adjust her teaching strategies and content. She also publishes articles and book chapters on social justice teaching interventions that navigate the ‘shifting waters’ and ‘messiness’ of teaching.

Leanne is committed to educational leadership through program coordination, event planning, course design and community engagement. Both her pedagogy and scholarship offer insight into the theoretical, social, and political tensions that inform equity education in K-12 and in postsecondary contexts.