WASHINGTON – Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings offered polite criticism, weighty research insights, and humor on Thursday at the Eighth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington.
“I want to argue that education and race – in this case, literacy and race – have been intricately linked for centuries,” said Ladson-Billings, who has co-edited six books, written four books and published numerous educational articles. “Until we begin to unpack those linkages, we will continue to struggle to make sense of how race operates in our research and scholarship.”
The event was hosted by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), which established its lecture series in 2004 to commemorate the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 outlawing public school segregation.
Ladson-Billings delivered Thursday’s lecture, entitled “Through a Glass Darkly: The Persistence of Race in Education Research,” to discuss the connections among research, education, and the quest for social equality. Besides being the Kellner Family Chairwoman in Urban Education and professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she’s been a member of AERA since 1989 and the organization’s past president from 2005 to 2006.
One central highlight during the 40-minute speech came when she parsed the challenge for those teaching Black students into three concepts: student learning, development of cultural competence and promotion of socio-political consciousness.
“It did not rest on tinkering with the curriculum, or demanding absolute quiet, or having everyone wear a uniform,” she said. “It rests on a teacher who believes deeply in the intellectual capability of the student and his or her own efficacious abilities.”
Throughout her research career, she noted, Ladson-Billings has battled racial stigmas attached to Blacks and other underrepresented minorities. While conducting research during a doctoral fellowship, she noticed the key words online for Black and African American education were referenced as “see culturally deprived” and “see culturally deficient.”
