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 helped her to grow as a critical educator.
In her work at Denver South High School since 2010, Breden redesigned the school’s Social Problems course, where students study everything from the Black Lives Matter movement to LGBTQ+ history to their own philosophies of education. Additionally, she designed the elective course Holocaust and Human Behavior, which is now taught to nearly 100 students per year at Denver South High and is available for other DPS schools to offer.
With several other social justice-minded educators, Hayley worked to plan and implement a social justice book study for Denver South High staff in the 2016-17 school year, and then a school-wide social justice professional development series for 2017-18.
Hayley is also a member of the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board.
