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Meira Levinson is the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at Harvard University. She is a normative political philosopher who works at the intersection of educational ethics, civic education, youth empowerment, and racial justice. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching middle school in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools. Levinson is currently working to start a global field of educational ethics, modeled in some ways after bioethics, that is philosophically rigorous, disciplinarily and experientially inclusive, and both relevant to and informed by educational policy and practice.
Levinson has written or co-edited nine books, including Civic Contestation in Global Education and Educational Equity in a Global Context (both 2024, with Ellis Reid, Tatiana Geron, and Sara O’Brien), Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education (2023, co-authored with Jeremy Murphy), Democratic Discord in Schools (2019, with Jacob Fay), winner of the 2020 AERA Moral Development and Education SIG Outstanding Book Award, and Dilemmas of Educational Ethics (2016, with Jacob Fay). Her book No Citizen Left Behind (2012) won awards in political science, philosophy, social studies, and education and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. Levinson shares educational ethics online resources on Justice in Schools, rich video materials to support higher education pedagogy at Instructional Moves, and resources for youth activists and teacher allies at Youth in Front. Each of these projects reflects Levinson's commitment to achieving productive cross-fertilization — without loss of rigor — among scholarship, policy, and practice.
Levinson earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale and a D.Phil. in politics from Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Guggenheim, the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the National Academy of Education.
A summer institute dives into teaching hard histories and tough topics in developmentally appropriate and pedagogically sophisticated ways
HGSE panel offered advice for educators in divided times
As national history and civics scores drop, educators are finding new ways to make room in their classrooms for social studies
An exploration of ways in which educators can instill civic identity in students