I AM SOMEBODY

My Story

Andreal Davis is a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, aunt and former Statewide Culturally Responsive Practices Coordinator in Wisconsin. Currently, Andreal is the CEO and Founder of Cultural Practices That Are Relevant LLC. & Professional Development Corporation. She received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Elementary Education in 1986 and a Master of Science Degree in Curriculum and Instruction in 1995 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also holds a certificate in Educational Administration from Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. Convinced of the importance of family and community in a child's education, Davis has been instrumental in forming family-school-community relationships ever since she began her teaching in 1986. She has served in various capacities in the public education arena including but not limited to an Elementary Educator, Title I Reading Instructor, Parent Involvement Coordinator, Instructional Resource Teacher for Cultural Relevance, Assistant Director of Equity and Family Involvement and the nation’s first Director of African American Student Achievement with the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin. She was formerly co-director, along with her husband Arlington, of the African American Ethnic Academy, an academic and cultural enrichment program that convened on Saturday mornings. As a product of the research she did while serving as co-director at the African American Ethnic Academy she was propelled by her own three sons and countless other under-served children across the country and devoted her life's work to researching best practices and models around Culturally Responsive Practices that speak to the unique identities and world views of these children.  

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Reflecting on her own educational experiences as a child and those she has had as a classroom teacher and mother, she has held deeply in her heart the people, purposes and passions that shaped and have had a profound effect on the educational leader she is today. Many of these experiences remain in her institutional memory and call her to create and share this work through publishing books, developing curriculum and consulting work across the nation. Included in this repertoire of tools and resources are a professional development model called Cultural Practices that are Relevant (CPR) that supports and strengthens Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching. Most recently she has published her first culturally responsive children’s book called, “Dreaming In Ethnic Melodies” that shares the hopes and dreams she has held for her own three sons. She formerly served as Wisconsin's Culturally Responsive Practices Coordinator at the Wisconsin Response to Intervention Center. In that role she led this work along with a team of colleagues, training practitioners across the state of Wisconsin and nationally from a model she co-created called the Model to Inform Culturally Responsive Practices that focuses on what it means to be culturally responsive starting with self and moving that work across an entire equitable multi-level system of support.

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As a result of this work Andreal has received various awards. She was the recipient of the NBC 15 News Crystal Apple Award in 2000, UW-Madison Lois Gadd Nemec Distinguished Elementary Education Alumni Award in 2004, Order of the Eastern Star Mother Full of Grace in 2004, the Milken National Educator Award in 2004 and the YWCA woman of Distinction Award in 2013.