Ann Berlak has been a teacher and teacher educator in Massachusetts, St. Louis and California for over fifty years. She remembers wondering why she was never taught about rich and poor or white and black people when she was in elementary school. She has long believed that schools should be places where children learn to become active creators of a more just and joyful world. She now writes fiction intended to spark thought and conversations about the injustices children and young people experience and show how people working together can bring another better world into being. Joelito’s Big Decision is her first children’s book.She's also always wanted to understand the different lenses people use to make sense of social experience, and how people come to question what they "take for granite." Her PhD thesis (written in 1965) was an interview study of sixth grade boys' and their teachers' views of authority and deviance in a newly de-segregated school. She's always thought she should have eschewed the analysis and just published the interviews.She was co-author, with Sekani Moyenda, of Taking it Personally: Racism in classrooms from kindergarten to college, a study of a traumatic racial event in a college classroom (her own), and its aftermath. She also wrote, with Harold Berlak, Dilemmas of Schooling; teaching and social change, that provided a way to formulate differences in thought and action between the English Primary Schools and the Primary Schools in the US in the Sixties and early seventies.