Brown Bag Seminar: Race, Identity, and Learning: How Schools Can Support Students in Developing Productive Racial and Academic Identities

In this talk, Na'ilah Suad Nasir will present theory and findings from her research on race, identity, and learning for African American students in urban public schools. She will highlight the multiple ways that processes of racialization in schools are linked to opportunities for identity construction and development, as well as being critically connected to opportunities to learn and thrive in school. Nasir will draw on findings from several studies to highlight how students experience and negotiate racialization and racial stereotypes in schools, how families support students in the navigation, and how teachers and school provide challenges and supports to this process in ways that impact opportunities to learn and develop positive identities. She will end by highlighting recent work on intervention classes focused on African American male 9th graders in Oakland Unified School District, and how these all-Black, all-male classroom spaces are supporting new versions of identity and new ways of managing racism in school for students.

Professor Nasir was the recipient of the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship in 1998, and the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. From 2000 to 2008, she was an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, where she won the St. Claire Drake Teaching Award in 2007. In 2006, she won the Early Career Researcher Award from Division G of the American Educational Research Association. Recent work has been published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the American Educational Research Journal, and Educational Researcher.