I recently confessed to a colleague that writing makes me very anxious. She was surprised and found it hard to believe. Well, it’s true. But working through the anxiety is what makes me so proud to be able to say I’m a published author. Be it a personal essay, blog entry, academic article, or book, my writing focuses on themes of Black struggle, progress, and visions of equity and justice. I want my writings to convey the broad range of Black artistic expression, education and enterprise, direct actions, and so much more that contribute to Black people’s progress. I hope my writings inspire people to create a more just world.
My books include: Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (2021) published by Harvard Education Press; Magical Black Tears: A Protest Story (2021) published by Derute Consulting Cooperative; Black Participatory Research (2016) co-edited with Elizabeth Drame, published by Springer / Palgrave McMillan; and most recently Dignity-affirming Education: Cultivating the Somebodiness of Students and Educators (2022) with co-editors Charity Anderson and Charles Payne, published by Teachers College Press. By the way, I think you’ll like these books. Learn more and purchase books below:
An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K–12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves “stuck improving,” caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process.
Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school’s increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders’ attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming.
Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change.
Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.
When unusual events occur in Maya’s neighborhood, she wants to know what is happening. Her curiosity leads her on an eventful journey to find answers.
Ultimately, Maya and her brother Kyle discover the magical power of everyday people taking direct action to make the world a better place.
The word “dignity” is not typically used in education, yet it is at the core of strong pedagogy. This book names the concept and shows readers what education looks like when it is centered on students’ dignity. By bringing together a collection of chapters written by authors with wide-ranging expertise, this volume presents a powerful approach to education that reminds people of their somebodiness—the premise that each person inherently possesses the intellectual acumen and creative resources to pursue development on their own terms. This timely book brings dignity into sharper focus, moving the field toward a language that captures what is required for oppressed communities to recognize their potential. It synthesizes research for educators, school leaders, and educational activists to help them make sense of what they are working for and against: dignity and the numerous affronts to it. Dignity-Affirming Education is important reading for anyone who works with students of any age, including nontraditional or adult learners, in formal and informal educational contexts.
Book Features:
Black Participatory Research explores research partnerships that disrupt inequality, create change, and empower racially marginalized communities. Through presenting a series of co-reflections from professional and community researchers in different locations, this book explores the conflicts and tensions that emerge when professional interests, class and socio-economic statuses, age, geography, and cultural and language differences emerge alongside racial identity as central ways of seeing and being ourselves. Through the investigations of black researchers who collaborated in participatory research projects in post-Katrina New Orleans, USA the greater Philadelphia–New Jersey-Delaware region in the northeastern USA, and Senegal, West Africa, this book offers candid reflections of how shared identity, experiences, and differences shape the nature and process of participatory research.
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