Dr. Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker

Dr. Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker (she/her) is the Assistant Dean of Credentialing and Partnerships in the School of Education. Dr. W. Garrett-Walker is a Black, Indigenous (Natchitoches Tribe of Louisiana, enrolled member) and Queer wife, mother and scholar born and raised on Raymaytush Ohlone Land. Whitneé has extensive experience loving, living and working in the field of public education and spent over a decade as a middle and high school teacher, instructional coach and school administrator in urban public schools in Oakland Unified and San Francisco Unified School Districts, respectively. Dr. Garrett-Walker is a triple- credentialed California educator who believes deeply in the power of critical hope, healing, and educational justice.

Whitneé is a qualitative researcher whose scholarship is grounded in her desire to explore and make known the experiences of racialized and gendered people in educational leadership, more specifically, Black and Indigenous women. Her dissertation titled, Replanting a Wild Seed: Black school leaders subverting Ideological Lynching, explored the life and work of current and retired Black women in urban a larger urban school district in Northern California. Drawing on the work of Octavia Butler, Ida B. Wells and Whitneé’s own ancestors, she sought to bring Black women in conversation across different generations to find out why they’re in this work and how they heal in the face of such intense and unforgiving work. Dr. W. Garrett-Walker’s dissertation was awarded dissertation of the year by the Leadership for Social Justice SIG of the American Educational Research Association in Spring 2022.

Most recently, Whitneé served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Policy and Social Diversity at University of Toronto. It was in this place that Dr. W. Garrett- Walker began to understand her work and commitments to educational justice, while in higher education. She developed courses such as “Critical Race Theory in Educational Leadership” and “Qualitative Research Methods for Liberation,” because she believes wholeheartedly that these offerings are a necessity now more than ever. Whitneé has several projects underway including her first academic book with Lexington Press tentatively titled, “On Sunflowers and Solidarity: Black and Indigenous Women in Educational Leadership.

• Critical Race Theory in Education
• Black Feminism(s)
• Indigenous Feminism(s)
• Educational Leadership
• Social Justice Education
• Decolonization
• Critical Autoethnography

• Ed.D in International and Multicultural Education, University of San Francisco
• Master of Arts in Teaching, Saint Mary’s College of California
• Bachelor of Arts in History, University of California, Berkeley