Jenice View, Alana Murray, and Deborah
Menkart at the Movement book launch
Deborah
Menkart
is the executive director of Teaching
for Change, an organization dedicated to spreading social
and economic justice by promoting equity-related teaching
materials, offering professional development to teachers,
and increasing parent engagement in schools through groundbreaking
DC area programs. In her 15 years as executive director,
Menkart has developed a catalog that over 40,000 educators
from across the country rely on for progressive teaching
materials and has helped launch the school reform collaborative,
DC VOICE. She is also the coeditor of Beyond Heroes and
Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural
Education and Staff Development, which has sold over 30,000
copies to date.
Menkart’s
activism began in junior high school when she joined protests
of D.C.’s “taxation without representation”
and the “dresses-only” dress code for girls.
During the 1970s she lived in San Diego, California, where
she worked as a shipyard electrician and was involved in
the antiwar, women’s, international solidarity, and
labor movements.
Menkart
received a B.A. in Human Services and a master’s in
curriculum and instruction from George Washington University,
but attributes most of her learning to colleagues at Teaching
for Change, Rethinking
Schools, DC VOICE,
and the National Coalition
of Education Activists..
Alana
D. Murray is
an educator-activist who has taught world history on both
the middle- and high-school levels in Montgomery County,
Maryland public schools for seven years. She has created
pilot lessons on African-American history, conducted youth
leadership training workshops for several organizations
(including the National Youth Leadership Forum) and has
provided professional development to educators at conferences
across the country. Murray has participated in the National
Endowment for the Arts Summer Institute for Teachers and
the Fulbright Summer Scholars program in Mexico.
Murray
received a B.A. in government and politics from the University
of Maryland and a M.A.T. from Brown University. Her work
on this project stems from both professional and personal
experience. She is the granddaughter of Donald Gaines Murray,
whose landmark lawsuit against the University of Maryland
Law School successfully desegregated the university. Her
grandparents dedicated their careers to an equal education
for all children and her parents instilled the critical
roles of research and community organizing.
Dr.
Jenice L. View is the education and training director
of Just Transition Alliance, a national economic and environmental
justice organization, and teaches eighth grade at a public
charter school in Washington, DC. For more than 20 years,
View has worked with a variety of nongovernmental organizations,
including the Rural Coalition, the Association for Community
Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the
voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations:
women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents,
and especially youth. She has a B.A. from Syracuse University,
an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute
and University.
View, a native of one of the last U.S. Colonies (Washington,
DC), is the proud mother of two daughters, Ava and Leah.
She hopes to pass on her inheritance of being a politically
aware and socially active woman that she received from many
including her paternal grandparents (among the first organizers
in the Nation of Islam in the 1940s), and her parents (who
have helped form and sustain many local D.C. community institutions).
