Best Should Teach Keynote Speakers
For over 20 years, the has included a keynote presentation from a distinguishedinvited educator.
2024-2025
Join us in the CASE Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium (4th Floor) on Thursday, May 1, 2025,at 6:00 p.m. MT for the Best Should Teach Lecture and Awards Ceremony followed by Keynote Alphonse Keasley.
Alphonse Keasley is a dynamic leader and our exciting keynote speaker! With over 30 years at 91ý, Alphonse has worn many hats—as a student, faculty member, staff member, and as former Associate Vice Chancellor in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement. He thrives on diverse interactions with students, faculty, staff, and administration, making a lasting impact across the university. Beyond his work at CU, Keasley is the president of the Boulder County Arts Alliance and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival Guild. He is deeply committed to the Boulder community, working with initiatives like the Healthy Community Initiative and IMPACT (the fundraising arm of Boulder Valley School District). He also plays a key role in supporting the Family Learning Center’s transformative “Rites of Passage” summer program for middle school students, helping shape the future of education in our community.
For this year’s Best Should Teach Ceremony, keynote speaker Alphonse Keasley will reflect on his extensive experience in higher education and his involvement with national organizations focused on diversity and student engagement. Drawing on his personal journey as both an administrator and educator, Alphonse will explore the valuable lessons learned from his work with programs like the Pre-Collegiate Development Program and the National Survey of Student Engagement. He will use the lens of historian Patty Limerick's approach—"Turning Hindsight into Foresight"—to discuss the challenges of today and the future, and share insights on how we can better support marginalized students in navigating an ever-changing landscape of education. With a focus on inclusion, family involvement, and high-impact practices, Alphonse will highlight the importance of transformative education in the face of adversity.
2024
Kevin Gannon's talk, Is It Time to Change Your Mind?, covered how might we (re)connect with our agency, and use it to anchor our practices in an ethic of hope. This talk suggested specific places to start, and offered strategies to identify and critique the assumptions we bring to teaching. Kevin Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.
2022-2023
What to do when you don’t know what to do: Teaching for equity and justice on days after.
Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn,Director of Teacher Education for the Neag School of Education and an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction
2021
This Best Should Teach awards ceremonyincluded 2020and 2021awardees. The ceremony wasinvitation onlyto minimize contact. Awardees took turns speaking at the event as they received their awards. There was no guest speaker for this event.
2020
In 2020, the Best Should Teach awards ceremony was postponeddue to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
2019
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
Bettina L. Love, Associate Professor of Educational Theory & Practice, the University of Georgia
2018
Habits of the Mind: Global Approaches to Teaching and Learning
Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University
2017
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Classroom
Thomas Cech, Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Professor, and Director of CU's BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder
2016
Using the Tools of Critical Race Theory and Racial Microaggressions to Examine Everyday Racism in and out of the Classroom
Daniel Solórzano, Professor of Social Science & Comparative Education, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
2015
The Republic of Imagination: Humanities & the Future of Democracies
Azar Nafisi, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University
2014
The Best Should Research Teaching: Impacts of Physics Education Research
Steven Pollock, Professor, Physics; Carnegie Professor of the Year
2013
One Big Sandbox
Elisa Villanueva Beard, Co-CEO, Teach for America
2012
“Getting Serious” About Education: Cultivating CulturallyRelevant Teachers for New Century Students
Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011
The Best Should Teach Legacy
Philip P. DiStefano, Chancellor, University of Colorado Boulder
2010
Science and the World’s Future
Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief, Science magazine
2009
The Pedagogical Imagination: Teaching toward Possibility
Kris Gutiérrez, Provost’s Chair, School of Education
2008
Why the Best Should Teach: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility
Donna Dickenson, Emeritus Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of London
2007
Save the World on Your Own Time
Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law,College of Law, Florida International University
2006
The Role of Teaching in Countering Social Inequality
Pedro Noguera, Professor, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University & Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education
2005
Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science (and a Lot of Other Subjects)
Carl Weiman, Professor, Physics
2004
The Less Teaching, the More Learning, and Other Lessons from the Radical Past
Martin Bickman, Professor, English, CU-Boulder
2003
Twins Separated at Birth: the Reunion of the Sciences and the Humanities
Patricia Limerick, Professor, History & Environmental Studies and Chair of the Board & Faculty Director for the Center of the American West
2002
A New Faculty for the New American Century: Challenges and Opportunities
Orlando Taylor, Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University
2001
Teaching Science in the 21st Century
Margaret Murnane, Professor, Physics
2000
Teaching Because Democracy Matters
Walter Parker, University of Washington
1999
Where Love & Need Are One: A New Day for Teaching
Eugene Rice, Director for the Forum on Faculty Roles & Rewards, American Association for Higher Education