My teaching interests broadly include topics related to the sociology of education, youth studies, community-based youth organizations, sociology of race, critical pedagogy, Black education, youth resistance, urban education and policy, community-engaged research, and critical ethnographic and qualitative methodologies.
This course explores the study of youth through theoretical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives with a particular focus on youth of color in marginalized contexts. This course interrogates the concept of “youth” as a socially constructed category and examine how “youth” have been positioned within educational, political, economic, and social contexts. Themes explored include: conceptions of youth as a social category, education and schooling, race, gender, sexuality, politics and activism, community-based learning, criminal justice, media, and popular culture.
This course is the graduate-level version of Youth, Education + Society.
This course provides students with the opportunity to engage with and discuss historical, ideological, and contemporary issues within after school community-based programs at large and within the local context. Rethinking After School Education is a community-engaged learning course intended to provide students with a theoretical understanding of after-school education, as well as an applied and practical approach to working with and being of service to community-based programs.
Drawing upon theoretical and empirical literature, students are asked to critically think about the ways political and social context shapes the construction and culture of these spaces. Students explore how educational policy and the confluence of power, race, class, and gender, shape community-based programs for youth. This course examines the ways these diverse out-of-school spaces inform the educational experiences, political identity development, and organizing and activist lives of minoritized and vulnerable youth. Topics include: grassroots organizing and activism, academic outcomes and access to higher education, full-service community-schools/school-community partnerships, socio-political development, funding and philanthropy, neoliberalism and education privatization, and after-school and out-of-school time education. This course challenges students to think critically community-based spaces and their capacity for educational, political, and social change for youth and communities.
This class provides instruction on the skill and technique required to effectively manage your time and organize and execute a writing project in a timely fashion. By the end of this class, students have a clear plan in place to complete a writing project to prepare for academic publication. The skills learned in this class will be useful for any subsequent writing project—large or small, single author or co-authored students take on. In this course, you will also develop a habit of daily writing. By the end of this course, students will completed semester writing goals, develop a habit of daily writing, and submit a manuscript for publication.
If schooling exists as a site of suffering for Black youth, what then do we do with schools? What might this mean for community-based or home-based educational spaces? In what ways do the frameworks and theories commonly used to understand educational problems adequately describe the suffering of/and methods of refusal employed by Black youth, Black educators (in and out of school), and Black families’ relationship to education? What language and theoretical tools do we have to understand the specificity of how education is administered to and within Black communities? What frameworks are required and in what contexts? This seminar engages with texts (e.g. scholarly writing, memoirs, film, music, etc.) drawing from a range of disciplines and perspectives concerned with Black education and Black educational futures. As a class we wrestle with frameworks to help us diagnose educational problems facing Black youth and communities. As a class community, we co-create and co-envision the possibilities of liberatory educational spaces and a radical imagining of Black educational futures and possibilities.