Whitney Gaines is a biracial (Black & white), queer, nonbinary human from Denver, Colorado. They graduated cum laude as a Renaissance Scholar from the University of Southern California with a BA in English and a BA in Political Science. They also earned their MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Stony Brook Southampton. Whitney has twelve years of teaching experience, both in private and public settings, from elementary schools though college. Their pedagogy is guided by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of The Oppressed: namely, that a great education is liberatory and co-creative. 

As an educator, their job is mostly facilitation: education is a collaborative process, and not one where a teacher provides information that students memorize, regurgitate, and apply. After ten years of working in the classroom, Whitney left classroom teaching because they were frustrated by a system that consistently fails to live up to its values.  They believe education should be a joyous and liberatory practice. To that end, they have created a space where they could continue the work that they started in schools but couldn’t fulfill because of either the corporatization of private education or the systemic defunding of public education. Thus, Theory & Practice was born! 

In addition to teaching, Whitney is an award-winning memoirist whose work focuses on intersectionality and deconstructing systems of oppression through humor. In other words, they make jokes about the problems of the world in hopes of creating something different.