Maisha T. Winn

Maisha T. Winn is the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professor and Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning's Equity in Learning Initiative. She is the Principal Investigator for the Futuring for Equity Lab. Her scholarship examines how non-dominant youth and communities have developed literate trajectories across a range of historical and contemporary settings within and outside formal schooling. She seeks to understand how communities that have been depicted as under resourced create practices, processes, and institutions of their own—and what we can learn from those examples to build more just, more collaborative, and more equitable futures. An ethnographer by training, Dr. Winn also engages in historical research focused on social movements in education.

Dr. Winn has authored Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms; Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives; Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline; and Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education through Restorative Justice. She co-edited Faith Made Flesh: The Black Child Legacy Campaign for Transformative Justice and Healthy Futures (with Lawrence “Torry” Winn, Vajra Watson, and Kindra F. Block); Restorative Justice in Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning through the Disciplines (with Lawrence “Torry” Winn); and Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (with Django Paris). The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Review of Research in Education, Mind, Culture and Activity; and Anthropology & Education Quarterly are among the peer-reviewed journals that have published Dr. Winn’s work. Her forthcoming book, Futuring Black Lives: Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination, examines the role of print culture during the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975) and how publications produced by independent Black institutions can serve as maps of/for the future of Black education.

A 2022-23 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, Dr. Winn is an American Educational Research Association Fellow and the Association’s President-Elect, and a member of the National Academy of Education.