Faculty Campus Visit - Talk: Pavithra Nagarajan
In Person: Brownlee Room (SEB 2327)
Remote: https://umich.zoom.us/j/93959412459 (Passcode: Clinical)
This talk is part of the faculty search for a Clinical Assistant professor in Educational Studies with a focus on race and anti-racism, in particular as associated with foundations of schooling, teaching, learning, and teacher education. We ask all attendees to contribute to the search process by completing a candidate evaluation form.
Please join us in person so that our candidates have a good audience. There will also be options to participate via virtually live or to watch a recording. Please RSVP here so we can plan accordingly.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING TOPIC
Centering Care: The Role of Care in Advancing Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Research in Schools
Schools can be sites of possibility, but too often they exist as isolating and fraught spaces for children to navigate. Non-dominant (i.e., historically and involuntarily marginalized) youth, in particular, experience these harsh conditions in school through the stifling of their voices and their bodies in myriad ways, including harsher disciplinary measures and standardized curricula and testing. School-based researchers and educators share a responsibility to engage in care as a means of participating in and furthering a commitment to anti-racist praxis.
This presentation will draw upon empirically-grounded narratives to examine: (1) the role care plays in cultivating and sustaining relationships with youth participants in school-based research and (2) the pedagogical implications of teaching with and through care. In all, the presentation offers a critical examination of how to engage in care-based teaching and research to ensure that learning and knowing, respectively, are produced through respectful, caring partnerships with participants and school communities.
ABOUT PAVITHRA NAGARAJAN
Pavithra Nagarajan is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for State and Local Governance at City University of New York. Prior to joining the Institute, Pavithra was a Director of Research Strategy and Policy at the Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University. Nagarajan earned her PhD in Sociology and Education in the Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2019. Her research interests include urban education, school culture and discipline, anti-racism and care, race, gender, identity and agency, and boyhood. Her doctoral dissertation and related publications examine how adolescent Black boys experience, negotiate, and reconcile school (re)definitions of and messaging about masculinity. Nagarajan began her career in education as a founding teacher in a single-sex public school for boys, teaching 6th grade mathematics, social studies and art.