Ann Berlak

Ann Berlak is an educator, author, and lifelong advocate for justice-driven teaching, with over fifty years of experience as a classroom teacher and teacher educator in Massachusetts, St. Louis, and California. Her vision for education is rooted in the belief that schools should be spaces where children not only gain knowledge, but also learn to question injustice and imagine a better world. From a young age, she was struck by what schools left unsaid—particularly about race, class, and power—and that silence continues to shape her work today. Frustrated by the lack of children's books that address the realities of inequality, Ann decided to write her own stories that speak directly to young readers about the world they live in.

Her first children’s book, Joelito’s Big Decision, offers a thoughtful and accessible lens on worker justice and solidarity, designed to spark meaningful conversations between children and adults. Ann’s fiction invites readers of all ages to examine social injustice and believe in the possibility of collective change. She brings a critical and reflective lens to her writing, informed by decades of experience working with future educators and confronting institutional racism in classrooms.

Ann’s scholarly work reflects her deep interest in how people interpret their social world—and how those interpretations evolve. Her PhD research, completed in 1965, explored authority and deviance through interviews with sixth-grade boys and their teachers in a newly desegregated school. She often jokes that the interviews themselves told more truth than any analysis could. She co-authored Taking it Personally: Racism in Classrooms from Kindergarten to College with Sekani Moyenda, which documents a racial trauma in her own college classroom and its reverberating consequences. With Harold Berlak, she also co-wrote Dilemmas of Schooling, a comparative study of English and American primary schools that dissected the tensions between pedagogy and social change.

Now focused on writing fiction that challenges young people to think critically, Ann Berlak continues to blend activism, pedagogy, and storytelling in the hope of nurturing a more just and joyful world.