The Newbury Medal-winning young adult novel The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is a classic story of a dystopian future, describing a society which enforces “sameness” and ritualized murder in the name of peace and harmony. 

But when Teachers College alumna Amoy Walker (M.A.’06), named the 2020 “Teacher of the Year” by the Georgia Independent School Association teaches the book to her middle-school students, she also focuses on the past. In one exercise, Walker, humanities teachers and Curriculum Coordinator at the Atlanta Girls’ School, sends her students online to hunt for Time magazine covers that predate the book’s 1993 publication to “get a sense of the social and political issues” that influenced Lowry.

“The practice of diving deeply into a topic across disciplines” — and time periods — “helps strengthen and sharpen critical thinking skills,” Walker wrote in a 2020 essay published on Medium.com.

Walker has a strong awareness of the connections between past and future in her own life. She was in eighth grade when she and her family migrated to the New York City area from Jamaica.

“I came to this country on the heels of my grandmother’s dream of making a better life for her children and, subsequently, her grandchildren. And it was through the support of counselors, teachers, my family and Black immigrant women in my life that I obtained academic success.”

The path to success took Walker — the first member of her family to attend college — from a Long Island high school to an undergraduate Political Science and Women’s Studies program at Stony Brook University. From there, she enrolled at TC, where she earned her degree in Social Studies Education.

“I value reflection, learning and growing, and I found that in the classroom,” Walker says of her education journey. “I ended up working in a profession that helped me to change my circumstances.”

After two years teaching Social Studies in the New York public schools, Walker embarked for Palo Alto, California, with her entrepreneur husband, Tristan, the founder and CEO of Walker & Company, a corporation specializing in personal care products for people of color.

I value reflection, learning and growing, and I found that in the classroom. I ended up working in a profession that helped me to change my circumstances.

—Amoy Walker (M.A. ’06)

As a humanities teacher at The Girls’ Middle School in Palo Alto, Walker was “welcomed by a community of thoughtful and innovative women who helped me grow as an educator by showing me means to center a child in the classroom, reflect on the design-thinking process and iterative processes for learning. They helped me put all the wonderful things I learned at Teachers College into practice.”

Walker particularly credits her Palo Alto colleagues for helping her apply the TC legacy of keeping “equity at the heart of changing education for every child.

“What that looks like, for me, is being a trauma-informed teacher. It means looking at the research of equity and inclusion and figuring out how to create a safe and respectable place for all children to grow and learn. TC showed me how to look at the resources that a child needs to live a full and dignified life. And I have taken that understanding with me for all these years since I left TC.”

[Read an essay that Walker published last year through the National Association of Independent Schools.]

The Georgia Independent School Association concurred with that assessment, citing Walker’s “outstanding teaching and service” and saluting her for “everything you do for these young ladies and for all our young people and helping their dreams come true.”

Channeling the Black immigrant women who inspired her to pursue her own dreams, Walker vows to continue instilling her students — particularly those who look like her — with the realization that anything is possible: “We want to live the ideals of an American dream where my kid and other kids see a Black doctor or a Black head-of-school and realize that is what it means to be an American.”

— Steve Giegerich