Shelina Warren to Receive Street Law’s 2023 Classroom Champion Award

This year, Street Law is proud to present the 2023 Classroom Champion Award to Shelina Warren, a social studies teacher at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. The award will be presented at Street Law’s Awards Gala on April 20^th.

Each year, Street Law honors an exceptional educator for their exemplary use of Street Law materials and pedagogy in their classroom. Educators are nominated in the fall, and the winner is selected by a committee of Street Law staff, board members, and former award winners.

Shelina participates in multiple Street Law programs on a regular basis. She has attended several teacher professional development workshops led by Street Law staff, including recent workshops on how to teach Legal Life Skills in classroom settings and a recent multi-day summer academy for high school law elective teachers. For the past five years, her classroom has also participated in the Legal Diversity Pipeline Program in conjunction with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Additionally, as a member of Street Law’s Leadership Circle advisory group, Shelina regularly provides input on lessons being authored by Street Law staff.

Because of her multifaceted involvement with the organization, students in Shelina’s law and social studies classrooms can regularly be seen using Street Law’s curricular materials. Her Law and Justice Advocacy elective class, for example, is structured around Street Law’s Classroom Guide to Mock Trials. At the start of the semester, each class chooses the mock trial they would like to complete, and then, using Street Law resources, they accumulate the knowledge and skills to participate in a challenging mock trial at the end of the semester.

Her extensive participation in Street Law programming is borne of Shelina’s self-described pedagogical style—to “educate, validate, and empower” her students. This need is particularly strongly-felt when teaching at Dunbar High School, a Title I school where over 75% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch and nearly all students are people of color. “These students,” Shelina says, “will soon become tax-paying adults in D.C., which so desperately needs more people to use their voices to enact change.”

“Shelina’s dedication to students, and attention the unique challenges that face minority students specifically, is unmatched,” says colleague Nubia Gerima-Rogers.

Dunbar High School, clearly, is all the better for it. Over the course of her six-plus years at Dunbar, Shelina has served as the chair of the social studies department and the founding director of the school’s Eleanor Holmes Norton Law and Public Policy Academy. In keeping with Street Law’s student-centered pedagogy, she and her students have created her school’s “peer court,” a program for Dunbar students to provide restorative justice for disciplinary issues. Shelina has also established a campaign at the school in response to widely-felt concerns about police-community relations, helped to increase students’ awareness of Dunbar High School history, written grants that have spurred increased access to technology for students, and created a gun violence memorial on campus.

Shelina credits her success as an educator to students and colleagues who have pushed her to be the best teacher she can be. “My students know that one person can change the world, and they can be that person!” she says. “My classroom is a training ground for the real world by empowering them to greatness.”

For Shelina Warren’s outstanding work using Street Law materials and methods, and for her dedication to empowering the next generation of the local Washington, D.C. community, Street Law is proud to present her with its 2023 Classroom Champion Award.