Leanne Taylor
2021 Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence
Faculty of Education

Dr. Leanne Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and an affiliate with the Social Justice and Equity Studies Masters program (SJES). Her teaching is situated in the area of social justice, equity and activism in education and spans undergraduate, teacher education, and graduate levels.  

Dr. Taylor’s Teaching Philosophy is guided by Richard Milner’s principle: ‘Start Where You Are – But Don’t Stay There’. Her approach is grounded in a desire to inspire change, build critical capacity, and generate knowledge that will grow and continue long after students leave her course. By emphasizing the process of ‘unlearning’, she employs daily equity habit-building activities and multimedia methods (e.g. photo-based assignments and popular culture analyses) to move into the ‘messiness’, generate questions, and nudge students past their comfort zones toward their ‘learning edge’.  

Dr. Taylor is committed to educational leadership through program coordination, event planning, course design, and community engagement. She is also engaged internationally as conference convenor, research collaborator, and editor for the Journal of the International Society for Teacher Education (JISTE).  

Dr. Taylor takes to heart her philosophy Start where you are but don’t stay there, and refuses to get comfortable in her teaching. Drawing on emerging scholarship, she consistently re-adjusts her pedagogical approaches in the field. For example, she has published articles and book chapters on social justice teaching interventions, marginalized youth and access programs, and at-risk youth. She is currently finalizing a co-authored book manuscript on First Generation youth in postsecondary education with Routledge Press. 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.