C+I PhD candidate wins Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

Erin Dyke, PhD candidate in Culture & Teaching, wins doctoral dissertation fellowship. Erin’s dissertation research attends to what has become a seemingly intractable issue in education today: the overwhelming lack of racial diversity among U.S. teachers.

A broad array of institutions are increasingly concerned with the rhetoric and practice of ‘diversity’. The issue of racially diversifying the U.S. teaching corps is a key issue in education policy, teacher education, and in many urban community-driven efforts to influence schooling in their cities. Within education research, the latter realm is often passed over as a critical site that impacts the dynamics of schooling in society, and much research limits its investigations to the closed sites of policy, institutional, or professional practices.

Engaging in a year-long ethnographic study, this project examines the relationships and interplay between two grassroots education organizations and the state and institutional barriers they come up against in their struggle for educational self-determination.

One organization embedded within the Ojibwe language revitalization movement, is working to create an Ojibwe language immersion teacher training infrastructure and a culturally relevant credentialing process.

The second organization is a campaign led by a grassroots coalition of Twin Cities educators, students, parents, youth workers, and community members to demand access for people of color to become teachers in their communities.

Efforts to challenge the dispossession of communities of color and native communities from the right to teach their young are at once local and transnational. As such, Erin’s research is located within theoretical traditions of transnational feminisms (or, feminisms that trace, historicize and politicize global flows of peoples, ideas, and capital within traditions of scholar-activism), decolonial and feminist geography (which has contributed to understanding the ways in which our constructions and experiences of space and time mutually constitute relations of power); and critical and activist education research, which has brought these and other critical disciplines to bear on the everyday and historical effects of education policy and practice on communities most targeted for education intervention.

The study provides critical insights into the landscape and politics of urban education while taking a keen eye to the practices, counter-pressure, and effects of grassroots education organizing.

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