Prof. Chanelle Wilson Named a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow
Assistant Professor of Education Chanelle Wilson has been selected as a 2023 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.
Wilson is one of 25 postdotoral fellows selected from an extremely competitive pool of 195 education scholars. The fellowships are administered by the National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, and they are funded by a grant to the Academy from the Spencer Foundation. The fellowship program has over eight hundred alumni who include many of today’s leading education researchers.
The below description of Wilson's research comes from the National Academy of Education's webpage highlighting the 2023 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellows:
Does Anti-racist Teacher Preparation Endure?: Revisiting the Development of Racial Literacy in Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Five Years Out
The transition from undergraduate teacher preparation to in-service teaching practice is an important area of focus in the overall research on teacher development. Many formal public schooling institutions in the United States replicate oppressive social structures, hierarchies, and inequities, including racism. Specifically, the field needs more insight into the process of developing and solidifying an identity as a teacher for racial justice—an identity that must endure through challenging and even hostile contexts. This study prioritizes learning from (1) the perspectives of in-service teachers who participated in race inquiry groups during their student teaching and (2) their professional trajectories in implementing race-conscious practices during their first years of teaching. Critical Race Praxis and Racial Literacy, offer a powerful theoretical guide for the praxis work of in-service teachers that is the focus of this study, bringing together an argument for an understanding of racism with a focus on practices that can counter and begin to dismantle racist systems in education. Using qualitative methods, former teacher candidates, now in-service teachers, will be guided to reflect on their journey in education to be racially-literate educators through storytelling narratives. The approach to research includes a co-constructive, participatory process that engages teacher participants as co-researchers. Insights gained from this study will provide a window into what former pre-service teachers navigate after they graduate and how they undertake the journey of implementing racial literacy skills and teaching for racial justice.
In addition to being an assistant professor in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Colleges Education Program, Wilson is the director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College.