Julie Washington on her love of language and the future of teaching

On April 3, 2025, Julie Washington was appointed interim dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. No stranger to leadership roles, the professor of education was already associate dean for faculty development and diversity at the school, where she’s been a member of the faculty since 2021. Before that, Washington served as professor and chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Georgia State University and professor and chair of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Washington describes herself as a “language nerd” who, during her high school years, frequently won oratory contests and reveled in the art of diagramming sentences. After working with a speech-language pathologist for voice therapy during that same period of her life, Washington knew she had found the career she wanted to pursue. Most recently, her research has centered around how language impacts reading and writing and how it develops in children who learn variations of American English in their communities. Washington shares her expertise worldwide – this summer, she served as the keynote speaker at the Africa Dyslexia Conference, held in Accra, Ghana, an event co-sponsored by UC Irvine’s School of Education. In this episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, we’ll learn more about her origin story and the work she’s leading with UC Irvine’s Language Variation and Academic Success lab and Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub, which is funded by the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Washington will also share where she’s seeing the positive impacts of AI in education, why research drives practice in the field, and how she plans to lead her school and maintain its nationally recognized reputation during this time of funding uncertainty. “Words” the music for this episode, was provided by Audionautix via the audio library in YouTube Studio. Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.