Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Race Theory

 Dr. Lisa Damaschke-Deitrick is Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She previously worked as a Professor of Practice of Comparative and International Education at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania. She holds a Doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Tübingen, a M.Sc. in International Relations from the Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Her research focuses on how education policy is used as a solution or cure-all for societal issues in an international and comparative perspective. She conducts research on educational policies and practices designed to facilitate refugee youth’s participation in their new host societies. Her research areas further include refugee integration in schools and institutions of higher education, and educational poverty policies and programs for school dropouts. She has extensive experience conducting teacher training for the education of refugees.

Dr. Adrienne Dixson is a Professor in Education, Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois. Her primary research interest focuses on how issues of race, class and gender intersect and impact educational equity in urban schooling contexts. She locates her research within two theoretical frameworks: Critical Race Theory and Black feminist theories. She co-edited (with Celia K. Rousseau-Anderson) CRT in Education: All God's Children Got a Song (2006, Routledge) one of the first book-length texts on CRT in education. Most recently, she has been interested in how educational equity is mediated by school reform policies in the urban south. Specifically, she is interested in school reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, how local actors make sense of and experience those reform policies and how those policies become or are "racialized."  

Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Henry’s interdisciplinary program of research and teaching revolves around two central, interrelated questions. The first question critically examines how power and dominance shape and structure educational policies, practices, and reforms. His second question is concerned with how Black educational actors understand, resist, reconstitute, and transform educational fields to be equitable, just, and humanizing. More specifically, Dr. Henry’s research investigates: the racialized lived realities of charter schools and school choice policy and practice; the persistence of anti-Blackness in education; neoliberalism and educational markets; and culturally relevant and restorative justice approaches in education. Dr. Henry’s work is informed by Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theories, and Queer of Color Critique.

Dr. Maria do Mar Castro Varela is a professor of Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Science in Berlin. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Pedagogy and a PhD in Political Science. Her research interests lie in Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies, Critical Migration Studies, Critical (Adult-)Education, Trauma Studies, and Conspiracy Theories. Amongst others, she was awarded the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professorship at the University of Vienna and was a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Human Science (IWM) in Vienna and at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) in Melbourne. María do Mar is the founder of the bildungsLab* in Berlin and chair of the Berlin Institute for Contrapunctual Social Analysis (BIKA).

Dr. Jill Koyama, a cultural anthropologist, serves as Professor and Vice Dean of the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation in Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Her research is situated across several integrated strands of inquiry: the productive social assemblage of policy; the controversies of globalizing educational policy; the politics of immigrant and refugee education; and community organizing and activism. For the past fourteen years, Dr. Koyama’s research has centered on how, even under dire circumstances and inhospitable politics, displaced people access and create resource-rich networks, make space for themselves and their families, and take civic action in the United States. Such research has led her to challenge notions of global citizenship and interrogate traditional pathways of civic engagement, leadership, and education.