Michael Lawrence-Riddell

Michael Lawrence-Riddell is an award winning public school educator, who spent two decades in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. He is also a guest lecturer in the Department of Education at Westfield State University. As the founder and executive director of Self-Evident Education Michael brings all of his expertise as an educator and his vision of the power of storytelling to address complex and hard history to his work. Self-Evident is a non-profit dedicated to helping educators and communities in their quests to honestly and rigorously understand the histories and legacies of systemic racism. Michael founded Self-Evident Education in September 2019, in response to the urgent need for our society to honestly and rigorously engage in work to understand the histories and legacies of race and institutional racism. Michael was inspired, in part, by his scholarship as an African-American Studies major at Wesleyan University, his work as a teacher of American History I, and the failures of our nation to truly reckon with the racial inequities present in history and our contemporary society. When Michael could not find the kinds of engaging and accessible multimedia resources he was seeking to critically examine the histories and legacies of systemic racism in the United States, he set out to create them with a team of brilliant and trusted collaborators. Michael believes fully in the power of stories to change the world.