Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, December 18th at 11 in the library and on Zoom for Visiting Scholar Ansley Erickson’s presentation, “Making and Unmaking a School for Black Girls in Harlem.”
Erickson is Associate Professor of History and Education Policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Erickson also co-directs the Teachers College Center on History and Education, which works with scholars, educators, and community members to generate new knowledge about teaching and learning in the past and explore their implications for the present, with a primary focus on the history of education in New York City.
She holds a PhD from Columbia University in United States History and a BA from Brown University in Educational Studies and Political Science. Erickson’s work focuses on how racism and capitalism shape schooling in cities, and how communities fight for educational equality. Her first book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (University of Chicago, 2016) won the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award in 2017. She is co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, published by Columbia University Press in 2019 and available in an open-access digital edition.In addition to several academic journals, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Dissent magazine, Chalkbeat, The Tennessean, and The Nashville Scene. Before becoming a historian, Erickson taught history and humanities and conducted ethnographic research in New York City public schools and worked at two national education organizations, experiences that have informed her research.
At RSF she is writing a narrative history of public education in New York City by focusing on one school –Wadleigh, in Harlem–over its 125-year lifespan. Erickson is exploring the promises and limitations of democratic decision-making about schooling, particularly in the context of U.S. racism, by tracing major shifts in school governance, waves of school reform, and enduring community advocacy, as she addresses a crucial question: who decides?