About
Any intellectual pursuit requires engagement with students and learning that reflects their lives, the times they exist, and the futures they seek to dream. We, as educators, are endowed with the privilege, not the right, to collaborate with students to understand how their experiences are opportunities to learn complex material. Without studying them, material alongside youth, we remove ourselves from the existence of our futures. – A.F. Brown, 2022
Educator. Researcher. Leader.
Dr. Brown is the inaugural Associate Vice President of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) and professor at Erikson Institute: Graduate School in Early Childhood in Chicago, Illinois. Her research examines discussions of race in secondary school settings and how the discursive aspects of dialogue contribute to racial literacies in situ.
Ayanna is the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters and is the co-editor of Critical Consciousness in Curricular Research: Evidence from the Field and has presented her research nationally and internationally. She is the editor of Racial Literacies Informed by the Sociopolitical and Sociocultural Contexts for Youth, a special issue book published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
She is actively involved in several national grants, and the Co-Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation grant, RESULT, which works to increase the number of STEM majors to become teachers using literacy and culturally responsive education as a catalyst for thinking about teaching in everyday life. Brown along with her colleagues have recently been awarded a 1.3 million dollar NSF Grant, PRIDE, to continue to work toward increasing diverse teachers of STEM focusing on literacies and culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies.
Dr. Ayanna F. Brown is a 2023-2028 Fellow with the Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center and engages in research and advocacy nationwide and has presented her scholarship on four continents.
