Dr. Valerie Kinloch’s commitment to engaged pedagogies, community-centered work and educational equity and justice all stems back to the lessons she learned from her mother and father while growing up in the segregated south in Charleston, South Carolina.
“It’s this deep desire to not just give back, but to give of self and to actually make space for other people to enter into conversations that oftentimes they might not be a part of, they might be excluded from or they might not be represented in,” says Kinloch, the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. “I think deeply about family, and to do right by them is to do good work in the world and to always remember their struggles.”
Denied access to certain educational opportunities, Kinloch’s family’s perseverance instilled in her an understanding of the richness and complexities of who people are, she says, recalling the Black excellence and brilliance surrounding her as she grew older.
Today, this understanding undergirds her work and scholarship on literacy, language and culture and community engagement of youth and adults inside and outside of the classroom.
“All of that is framed within a conversation and a commitment to equity and justice,” Kinloch says. “Sometimes, we use words like inclusion and diversity, and those words are really important, and oftentimes, we don’t really get to the heart of thinking about what equity and justice represents and means.”
Kinloch’s research explores “big and little” questions: “How is it that we should have a commitment to thinking about the connections between education inside of schools and education inside of communities? How do we think about racism and inequities within educational systems that, in many ways, are not set up to support, to nurture, to love, to teach our young people, and particularly our young people of color?”
With these questions, Kinloch then works with a host of groups, including community organizations, social service agencies, school districts, teachers unions, teacher educators, superintendents and more to “really think about what is the purpose of our work, and for whom,” she says.
