Miles to go

Miles To Go: The State of Education for Black Students in America

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Joyce King, Ph.D.

Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership, Georgia State University Liberal Arts Education: An HBCU Cornerstone Project Advisor

Dr. Joyce E. King holds the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership at Georgia State University (GSU). She has served as provost at Spelman College; associate provost, Medgar Evers College (CUNY); associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and diversity programs at the University of New Orleans; director of teacher education at Santa Clara University; and head of the department of ethnic studies at Mills College. Her concept of “dysconscious racism,” “heritage knowledge,” and “diaspora literacy” continue to influence education research and practice, curriculum transformation, and the sociology of race. She holds affiliated faculty status in the GSU Department of African American Studies, the Women’s and Gender Studies Institute, and the Urban Institute. In 2017 she led a Comparative Urban Partnership grant with faculty in South Africa and Brazil and she served as principal investigator for a Collaborative Opportunity Grant, “Social Justice and Student Success,” at GSU funded by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. Dr. King’s urban education-related publications focus on a transformative role for culture in curriculum, urban teacher effectiveness, and Black education research and policy. She is an editorial board member for the journal, Urban Education and co-edited the top-ranked journal, Review of Education Research. In addition to eight books, her scholarship appears in the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Negro Education, Qualitative Studies in Education, Teaching Tolerance Magazine, and the Journal of African American History, including:
  • Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Practice, 1990/1995
  • Teaching Diverse Populations: Formulating a Knowledge Base, 1997
  • Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century, 2005
  • A reparatory justice curriculum for human freedom: Rewriting the story of African American dispossession and the debt owed. African American History, 102, 213-231, 2017.
  • “We may well become accomplices”: To rear a generation of spectators is not to educate at all. Educational Researcher, 45(2), 159-172, 2016.
  • “Who dat say (we) too depraved to be saved?” Re-membering Katrina/Haiti (and beyond): Critical studyin’ for human freedom. Harvard Educational Review, 81(2), 343-370. Summer, 2011.
  • Re-membering History in Student and Teacher Learning, 2012
  • The Afrocentric Praxis of Teaching for Freedom: Connecting Culture to Learning, 2014
  • Dysconscious Racism, Afrocentric Praxis and Education for Human Freedom—Through the Years I Keep on Toiling—The Selected Works of Joyce E. King, 2015
  • Heritage Knowledge in the Curriculum: Retrieving an African Episteme, 2018.
  • Staying human: Forty years of Black Studies practical-critical activity in the spirit of (Aunt) Jemima. The International Journal of African Renaissance Studies – Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity,
  • A recent essay, “To Create a More Perfect Union, We the People Need Reparations to Heal Our Wounded Souls,” is published on the American Civil Liberties Union website https://www.aclu.org/issues/create-more-perfect-union-we-people-need-reparations-heal-our-wounded-souls.
Dr. King completed two prestigious leadership programs, the American Council on Education Fellowship in the Office of the President at Stanford University, and as a W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship recipient, she studied women’s leadership and grassroots participation in decolonizing social change in China, Brazil, France, Kenya, Japan, Mali, and Peru. Her innovative interdisciplinary research praxis encompasses Black/Pan-African Studies, the Sociology of Education, culturally connected teaching and learning, and transformative leadership for change often in creative partnership with urban communities. Dr. King is past president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (FoodFirst.org) and the National African American Reparations Commission. She received the 2018 Stanford University Graduate School of Education Alumni Excellence in Education Award. Dr. King earned a doctorate in the sociology of education and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Stanford University, and she holds a certificate from the Harvard Graduate School Institute in educational management.