Conversation

Creating Racially Just Schools: Dr. April Baker-Bell

Mon, May 9, 2022

4:30 PM–5:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below. This event will be ASL interpreted and closed captioned.

Watch the video recording of this event here:

Join award-winning transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist Dr. April Baker-Bell who will be in conversation with Urban Education Ph.D students Noelle Mapes and Sunisa Nuonsy for the Creating Racially Just Schools speaker series as part of a class taught at The Graduate Center, CUNY by Terri N. Watson.

Click here to join the event via Zoom starting at 4:30 PM (EDT).

Meeting ID: 849 4737 0132. Passcode: 570750.This event will be ASL interpreted and closed captioned.

Dr. April Baker-Bell is an award-winning transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and associate professor of language, literacy, and English education in the Department of English and Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Baker-Bell is an international leader in conversations on Black Language education, and her research interrogates the intersections of Black Language and literacies, anti-Black racism, and antiracist pedagogies. Her award-winning book, Linguistic Justice: BlackLanguage, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism (a term Baker-Bell coined) and white linguistic supremacy. Baker-Bell is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the 2021 Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award, the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship, the 2021 Michigan State University’s Community Engagement Scholarship Award and the 2021 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity, the 2020 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, the 2020 Theory Into Practice Article of the Year Award, the 2019 Michigan State University Alumni Award for Innovation & Leadership in Teaching and Learning, and the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award.

Sunisa Nuonsy isa 1.5 generation Lao-American living and working in Brooklyn as a ninth year public school teacher at the International High School at Prospect Heights and a second year Ph.D.student in the Urban Education program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include critical language awareness, identity, and reimagining success. Sunisa holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Sacramento State University and a M.S.in TESOL from Long Island University-Brooklyn.

Noelle Mapes is an Urban Education Ph.D student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. As a third grade teacher, she learns daily alongside hilarious, creative kids who like to ask big questions and think critically about power structures. Her research interests are centered around education history and education policy. She’s seeking to further develop her own “big questions” around integration policies, school funding, and the ways these elements of education serve us and fail us.

The Creating Racially Just Schools speaker series is co-sponsored by Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, PublicsLab and The Schools We Need: Lessons Learned from Harlem project as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.