My sweet friend, colleague, and comrade Bill Watkins died suddenly at his home in Chicago. Heart-breaking. We have lost a distinctive voice and a powerful thinker, a gentle warrior and a generous friend, a brilliant historian and an inspiring teacher. From Professor Ming Fang He: Dr. William H. Watkins, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago since 1995, passed away peacefully in his home on the evening of August 5, 2014. William “Bill” Watkins was born in Harlem, New York and raised in Southcentral Los Angeles. A product of the Los Angeles public school system, Bill would say, he attended Los Angeles City College before transferring to the California State University at Los Angeles. He obtained a B. A. degree in Political Science-Pre Law (June, 1970). Relocating first to Brooklyn, New York then on to Chicago, Bill took up graduate studies and began teaching high school. He received a Masters of Education degree in 1979 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His Masters specialty was Curriculum Theory: Programs for Schools and Institutions. He completed the Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis/Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1986. In 1986 Bill accepted joint faculty appointments in the College of Education and the Department of African American Studies at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, where he remained for nine years. In 1995 Bill returned to the University of Illinois at Chicago as a professor in the College of Education. Bill’s areas of specialization include sociology of curriculum, African American education, history of curriculum, and curriculum movements. He was the editor of The Assault on Public Education: Confronting the Politics of Corporate School Reform (2012), Black Protest Thought and Education (2005), author of The White Architects of Black Education (2001) and lead editor of Race and Education (2001). In addition to many book chapters, his publications appeared in the (Macmillan) Encyclopedia of Education, Review of Research in Education, Journal of Interdisciplinary Education, The International Encyclopedia of Education, The International Encyclopedia of Curriculum, the Harvard Educational Review, Educational Theory, and the Encyclopedia of African American Education, Teaching Education, and Teaching for Social Justice among others. Bill presented his work throughout the United States; Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Uganda, Japan, Australia, Thailand, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Additionally, he traveled extensively throughout Western & Eastern Europe; the (former) Soviet Union; the Peoples Republic of China; India; the United Arab Emirates; the Caribbean; South America; Central America, (north) Vietnam, East, West & South Africa; and New Zealand. Bill was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award, Division B, American Educational Research Association (2011); The Mary Ann Raywid Award, the Society of Professors of Education (2011); and the Dean’s Merit Award, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago (2003).
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:32:37 +0000
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