BIO & EXPERTISE
A former classroom teacher and university professor with over two decades of experience in education, Katy Swalwell started her career teaching social studies at a public high school in the rural Midwest and a New England boarding school middle 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.
What Katy is most curious and passionate about is what helps people develop the knowledge and skills necessary for a healthy, "thick" diverse democracy. 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, 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 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, the co-edited volume Anti-Oppressive Education in 'Elite' Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales from the Field (Teachers College Press, 2021) with Daniel Spikes, and the "Amazing Iowa" series of children's books. She is also the co-host of the irreverent history podcast Our Dirty Laundry, which examines white women's complicity in white supremacy and the co-founder of Past Present Future Publishing, which helps authors bring local counter stories to life.
As a full-time consultant, Katy is available to facilitate virtual or face-to-face professional development for P-20 educators, develop curriculum, and conduct school equity audits.
What Katy is most curious and passionate about is what helps people develop the knowledge and skills necessary for a healthy, "thick" diverse democracy. 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, 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 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, the co-edited volume Anti-Oppressive Education in 'Elite' Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales from the Field (Teachers College Press, 2021) with Daniel Spikes, and the "Amazing Iowa" series of children's books. She is also the co-host of the irreverent history podcast Our Dirty Laundry, which examines white women's complicity in white supremacy and the co-founder of Past Present Future Publishing, which helps authors bring local counter stories to life.
As a full-time consultant, Katy is available to facilitate virtual or face-to-face professional development for P-20 educators, develop curriculum, and conduct school equity audits.