Inclusive Advocacy: How Ditching Deficit Views and Embracing a Systems View Helps Us Relate to and Advocate for Clients Experiencing Poverty

Paul Gorski  is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. He has 25 years of experience helping educators, nonprofit workers, and others strengthen their equity efforts. He has worked with educators in 48 states and a dozen countries. He also is the research director of the Equity Literacy Institute, conducting and collaborating on research and other scholarship related to maximizing the transformative potential of equity efforts. Paul has published more than 70 articles and has written, co-written, or co-edited twelve books on various aspects of educational equity including Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (with Seema Pothini). Paul spent nine years on the board of directors of the National Association for Multicultural Education and five years on the board of the International Association for Intercultural Education. He earned a Ph.D. in Educational Evaluation at the University of Virginia. He was a teacher educator at several universities for 15 years. He is also a father, a published poet, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and the biggest fan of Buster, his cat.