Leonard Waks received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1968. He has taught philosophy and educational theory at Purdue, Stanford, Penn State and Temple Universities. Since 2005, he has been emeritus professor of educational leadership at Temple University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, and the Royal Bank Fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. From 2018-2021 Waks was Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership, and director of the Center for East-West Studies in Education, at Hangzhou Normal University, China.

Waks has been the president of the John Dewey Society and recipient of the Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is co-editor (with Andrea English) of The Cambridge Centennial Handbook on John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and author of Education 2.0 (Routledge, 2014) and The Evolution and Evaluation of Massive Open Online Courses (Palgrave, 2017), as well as more than 100 scholarly journal articles and book chapters.