BIO & EXPERTISE
A former classroom teacher and university professor with over two decades of experience in P-20 education, Katy Swalwell started her career teaching social studies at a public high school in the rural Midwest and a New England boarding school summer program. In 2011, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction and has held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, George Mason University, the University of Maryland-College Park, and Iowa State University, where she was a tenured professor. As a full-time consultant, Katy is available to facilitate virtual or face-to-face professional development for P-20 educators, develop curriculum, provide 1-on-1 or team coaching, and conduct equity audits.
What Katy is most curious and passionate about is what helps people develop the knowledge and skills necessary to live well together in a diverse democracy with deep inequities. What do young people need to know and be able to do in order to help build a more just, sustainable, and equitable world? What tools and resources help educational leaders and teachers work with students in humane and loving ways—especially in a climate of increased partisanship and misinformation? Though she has worked with P-20 educators in a variety of educational contexts, grade levels, and disciplines, she is best known for her work focusing on schools serving predominantly white, affluent students and K-12 social studies education in the United States.
Katy's scholarship has appeared in practitioner publications like Educational Leadership, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching Tolerance as well as peer-reviewed journals like Curriculum Inquiry, Democratic Education, Education Policy, Theory & Research in Social Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Social Studies Research, and several edited volumes. She is the author of several books, including the award-winning Fix Injustice, Not Kids (ASCD, 2023) with Paul Gorski, Educating Activist Allies: Social Justice Pedagogy with the Urban and Suburban Elite (Routledge, 2013), Social Studies for A Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Guide for Elementary Educators (Norton, 2021 co-authored with Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, and Anti-Oppressive Education in 'Elite' Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales from the Field (Teachers College Press, 2021) co-edited with Daniel Spikes.
She is also the co-founder of Past Present Future Publishing and the author of the Amazing Iowa book series.
What Katy is most curious and passionate about is what helps people develop the knowledge and skills necessary to live well together in a diverse democracy with deep inequities. What do young people need to know and be able to do in order to help build a more just, sustainable, and equitable world? What tools and resources help educational leaders and teachers work with students in humane and loving ways—especially in a climate of increased partisanship and misinformation? Though she has worked with P-20 educators in a variety of educational contexts, grade levels, and disciplines, she is best known for her work focusing on schools serving predominantly white, affluent students and K-12 social studies education in the United States.
Katy's scholarship has appeared in practitioner publications like Educational Leadership, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching Tolerance as well as peer-reviewed journals like Curriculum Inquiry, Democratic Education, Education Policy, Theory & Research in Social Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Social Studies Research, and several edited volumes. She is the author of several books, including the award-winning Fix Injustice, Not Kids (ASCD, 2023) with Paul Gorski, Educating Activist Allies: Social Justice Pedagogy with the Urban and Suburban Elite (Routledge, 2013), Social Studies for A Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Guide for Elementary Educators (Norton, 2021 co-authored with Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, and Anti-Oppressive Education in 'Elite' Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales from the Field (Teachers College Press, 2021) co-edited with Daniel Spikes.
She is also the co-founder of Past Present Future Publishing and the author of the Amazing Iowa book series.