Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom

Derrick P. Alridge
Professor of Education, Curry School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia

Professor Derrick P. Alridge will discuss his research project, “Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom.” Based on extensive oral history research, including more than 200 interviews of elementary, secondary, university teachers and civil rights activists, Alridge will share the narratives of educators and explore their roles as teachers and activists during the civil rights movement and post-civil rights era. From the interviews, we learn how educators’ pedagogy was an instrumental form of activism that influenced the movement.  

Derrick P. Alridge is professor of history of education in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. His primary research areas of scholarship are African American educational and intellectual history and the civil rights movement. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History and co-editor, with James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin, of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History & Pedagogy and co-editor of the forthcoming The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century. He has published widely in journals in education and history. 

A former middle and high school social studies and history teacher, Alridge is also a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, and he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He is a 2016 recipient of the Lyle Spencer Research Award for his scholarship on teachers’ activism during the civil rights era. Alridge is the founder, director, and Principal Investigator of Teachers in the Movement project, founding director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South, and Principal Investigator of the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site – Ethnographic Resource Study with the National Park Service. He also serves as a co-chair on the Virginia Commission on African American History Education in the Commonwealth.

Professor Alridge is immediate past President of the History of Education Society, USA.