Lessons by Joya
For over 10 years, Joya Brandon’s classroom experience has traversed across various secondary schools in the Bay Area such as West Oakland Middle School and Roots International Academy. Joya began teaching in the Social Justice Academy at San Leandro High School in 2018 using a decolonized pedagogical stance.
She currently teaches English Language Arts through an Ethnic Studies lens to over 100 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. Here, Joya’s students enhance their critical consciousness in order to have agency over their own learning, question the status quo, and use their knowledge to serve and uplift their communities.
Her ultimate quest is for her students to embrace the power of words in order to use them to heal, inspire, question, and challenge systems and structures so that they can rebuild them and start anew. Joya is a founding Fellow of the Black Teacher Project in Oakland, California, a design catalyst with The Teacher’s Guild, and a teaching consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project.
She successfully completed the Alameda County Office of Education Integrated Arts Specialist Learning program in 2018, and has been invited to share her students’ work at the 2014 Oakland Museum Curriculum Slam, the Action for Arts Equity, the National Art in Education National Convention in Washington, D.C., and the Black Female Project: Conversations with The Black Teacher Project.
Joya is currently working on her Doctorate in Educational Leadership focusing on the use of social justice in pre-service teacher education programs.
