My name is Justin Hauver (he/him). I’m an educator interested in finding and cultivating learning experiences that create better futures. By better, I mean more humane, restorative, anti-racist, and oriented towards liberation. This is my website where I mostly post what I learn trying to figure out what that vision actually looks like. 

I first started working with youth as a tutor and college counselor in a YMCA program that served first-generation college bound students at Berkeley High School. That experience pushed me to become a middle school social studies teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2012. Teaching sixth and seventh grade was hardest thing I had ever done. It also felt like the most important. I became passionate about education, the injustices that permeate schools, and the ways that learning reveals us in deeply human ways. My seventh graders lived a less filtered life and inspired me to constantly think and reassess pretty much everything. 

Eventually I went back to school to get a MEd and then taught high school in San Jose and Sacramento, California. Then in 2021 I went to Bogotá, Colombia as a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching Fellow in order to study the ways that the Escuela Nueva education model centers communities and healing in a country marked by systemic violence, high numbers of internally displaced people, and recent waves of Venezuelan migrants.

In the fall of 2022 I will start as a PhD student in education at Harvard University. My interests include teacher education, restorative justice, and deeper learning.

I currently have a BA from UC Berkeley (2012), where I double majored in philosophy and German, as well as a MEd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (2017).