Pat Williams-Boyd is an Associate Professor of Education at Eastern Michigan University. She is a member of the Kellogg Foundation State of Michigan Advisory Board for the Middle Start Initiative. She has received an Office of Research and Development Fellowship for Project Middle Vision, a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley’s Developmental Studies Center for social justice in middle-grades education, a Knox Scholarship to study at Harvard, a Kellogg Foundation grant for Project Middle Vision, and three federal Comprehensive School Reform Initiative Grants for systemic reform initiatives with Title I schools.

She has presented her research at the annual meetings and conferences of numerous scholarly and professional organizations, including most recently the National Middle School Association’s annual meeting and the American Educational Research Association’s annual meetings, and she has forthcoming work in Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy (ed. Dan Weil and Joe Kinchloe). She has presented workshops throughout the United States on differentiated instruction and heterogeneous grouping, student-led conferences, portfolio assessment, teaming, educational leadership, suicide prevention, and full-service schools.

She is a reviewer for and has been cochair of the Nominations Committee for the Qualitative Special Interest Group for the American Educational Research Association. She is also a developer and director of Middle Vision: The Center for Dynamic Middle Level Education at Eastern Michigan University. She has worked closely with an Ypsilanti middle school that recently received an award from the U.S. Department of Education as a “Promising Site” for whole-school reform. During her twenty-eight years of public school experience, she has won numerous awards, including Teacher of the Year, Outstanding Young Educator from the Jaycees, and the Governor’s Award for Exceptional Service to Kansas Public Education. She is also listed in Who’s Who in American Secondary Education. She holds two doctoral degrees, one in ethnomusicology and the other in curriculum and instruction.