Bisola Wald
EDUCATOR, CONSULTANT, COACH
Founder, Birthing Equity in Education LLC
Bisola Wald began in education in the spring of 2005 as an English professor at VENUSA College in Merida, Venezuela. She has served as a professional educator, treasurer and charter school board member, teacher coach, diversity and education facilitator, webinar host, podcast guest and co-host, and professional development trainer. As an Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Qualified Administrator, she partners with educators and school leadership to develop and expand their capacity to effectively engage diversity, equity, inclusion, and retention. She is passionate and strategic about birthing equity through antiracist pedagogy and decolonizing education. As a first-generation Nigerian immigrant from a single-parent household, she teaches, leads, and writes out of the intersectionality of her own faith, ethnicity, and gender along with the social constructs of race and class.
From the inception of our nation, inequity continues to steal our collective wealth and progress, destroy the well-being of our families and communities, and abuse the intellectual and physical bodies of our children. However, Bisola believes that it is our focus on policies and structural powers, not race or class polarities, that will ensure the precision and efficacy of our social justice efforts in schools, health, and every area of society. She insists on an honest self-reflection that acknowledges that we are more than our privilege or lack thereof, our best intentions or worst assumptions, the charities we patronize, the inner-city schools we erect, the demonstrations we attend, the social media posts we write, and the partisan groups we subscribe to. We are more than the labels, rationalizations, and justifications of inequitable policies and structures of racism that penalize, suspend, exclude, and criminalize us due to our single-parent childhoods, socioeconomic realities, immigration status, the perceived intent of skin color, nonwhite cultural and social norms, and our experiences with racial trauma, other, or neither. We love deeper, lead better, and live richer when we are liberated from an identity earned only by our paternal care for those we perceive to be in need and a socially constructed identity dependent on what others perceive about us. With deep conviction, she challenges us to realize that, in all of God’s Glory and by Grace, we were intended to be and forever remain equally capable and sufficiently adequate groups of culture, gender, and class, not despite our differences, but because of our differences.
Bisola loves to participate in courageous conversations that dare to imagine and work to realize educational equity for all students by exposing the societal and self-harm of implicit bias and internalized race, ethnic, and gender discrimination. Her focus is studying school systemic trends and policies and their corresponding outcomes in the lives of students and families. Her commitment is to demystify practical steps of recruitment and retention in hiring that promote diversity and inclusion within administration and staff and its subsequent equitable benefits in the classroom. An advocate for the liberation of education and theology from the ownership, interpretation, and distribution of Western culture and thought, she believes that social and educational justice, pioneered by the intellectual writings and leadership of various elders, authors, scholars, and mentors of color, will aid to give our shared humanity the God-given right to breathe and space to heal.
Bisola currently raises her interracial family in Minneapolis alongside her friend and husband, Brandon Wald, two homeschooled sons, and her baby girl.