Rick Ayers

Rick Ayers is an Adjunct Professor in education at University of San Francisco and teaches at UC Berkeley. He is a PhD candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. He received his Masters in Education at Mills College (1997) and taught at Berkeley High School from 1995 to 2006. He has worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, as a teacher trainer for the Bay Area Writing Project, as a fellow at the Institute on Media and American Democracy, Harvard University, and as a core team member of the Diversity Project.

Rick is co-editor of the series Between Teacher and Text (Teachers College Press) and of the book Zero Tolerance: Resisting the drive for punishment, A handbook for parents, students, educators and citizens (2001, New Press). He is co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School Kids: A Teacher’s Guide to Books That Can Change Teens’ Lives (2004, Beacon Press), author of Studs Terkel’s Working, a Teaching Guide (2000, New Press) and co-creator (with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary (self published 2000, North Atlantic Book published, 2003.) He is the author of numerous articles including “Both Sides of the Mic: Community Literacies in the Age of Hip Hop” in The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the Communicative and Visual Arts, “La Silent, What is To Be Done? Profile of a Chicana student in trouble,” in Democracy and Education, blogs on Huffingtonpost.com, and writes book reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and Teachers College Record.

Rick grew up in Chicago and is married to Ilene Abrams (College Advisor at Oakland’s Envision Academy) and has three children, Aisha, Sonia, and Max, and a grandchild, Eliel (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-).