2025 AERA Distinguished Lecture: "Erasures and Mappings in African American Education: Tag, You Are It"

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Erasures and Mappings in African American Education: Tag, You Are It”
The scholarship of Vanessa Siddle Walker has explored sequentially the school-level characteristics that allowed African American children to believe they could succeed in a segregated world: the leadership practices, beliefs, and networks that African American educators used to build similar segregated school practices across the South; and the hidden advocacy collaborations that sought to create full access to all schools for African American children. In this lecture, Walker (a) elevates the context in which African American educators worked by overviewing some of the negative societal perspectives on African American children that filtered through American society as these educators worked to build schools; and (b) describes several specific strategies, invisible to unsuspecting eyes, African American educators employed to create opportunities for children despite the negative climate. By reviewing their erasures, challenges, and agency, Walker hopes a current generation might locate maps to import in their historic moment.

Sub Unit

• AERA Sessions

Chair

• Janelle T. Scott, University of California - Berkeley

Speaker

• Vanessa Siddle Walker, Emory University