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Irina Y. Starovoytova, a teacher of English and American Studies at Tambov School #6 in Tambov, Russia, created this retelling of a traditional Russian fable especially for Teaching Tolerance.

Jill E. Thomas taught English at Life Academy of Health and Bioscience, a small public high school in Oakland, California, for nine years. In addition to teaching English, she had the opportunity to design and teach electives in outdoor education, mindfulness, world dance and food systems. She now works for the Oakland Unified School District coaching principals to provide meaningful, growth-oriented feedback to teachers. She holds a bachelor of arts in English and anthropology from Santa Clara University and a master of arts in education from the University of California at Berkeley.

Leslie has been an elementary educator in central Virginia since 2008. As both a fourth-grade teacher and diversity resource teacher, she collaboratively designs and co-facilitates a variety of professional developments on multicultural education and culturally responsive instructional strategies. Wills-Taylor also organizes diversity awareness events that build sustainable home-school partnerships. She is one of the recipients of the 2016 Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching. She can be reached via Twitter @LeslieWillsTay1.

Naomi oversees the Southern Poverty Law Center’s legal and advocacy work on behalf of immigrants in the Deep South. She represents clients who have experienced wage theft, discrimination, human trafficking and other abuses. Tsu was counsel for immigrant workers in David v. Signal, one of the largest labor trafficking cases brought in the United States, which resulted in a $14 million jury verdict and for which her team was awarded Public Justice’s 2015 Trial Lawyer of the Year award.

For the past eight years, Hayley Breden has taught social studies courses at Denver South High School. Hayley attended Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Wisconsin, to earn her B.A. in history with minors in ethnic studies and environmental studies, along with her teaching license. She earned an M.A. in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice from CU-Boulder in 2016. Breden completed her student teaching at a public high school on Chicago’s South Side. Her time teaching in Chicago also included participating in the organization Teachers for Social Justice (Chicago TSJ), which

Mica Pollock, an anthropologist of education, studies how youth and adults struggle daily to discuss and address issues of racial difference, discrimination, and fairness in school and community settings. Her first book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School explores the question: when it is helpful, and when is it harmful, to talk about racial patterns in schools? Her new book, Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools, builds on her experience working in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, where she investigated and