I am . . . Carmen Kynard, Ph.D. . . Lillian Radford Chair in Composition and Rhetoric and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Yes, I am an academic, scholar, Black Feminist, and activist... but I understand myself as a critical educator first and foremost. |
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I have been teaching since 1993: starting way back with student teaching in an elementary school in South Central, LA; then off to middle school, junior high school, and college teaching in the Bronx, NY; and then more college teaching--- from community/comprehensive college to graduate school in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan NY as well as Newark, NJ. I've been teaching for as long as I can remember: "remedial" reading and writing for adults across the spectrum; decades of first-year writing college writing at the intersection of racial justice; advanced writing towards social justice from grades nine to upper-level college classes; literacy and arts-based approaches for high school science/ math/ social studies teachers; courses spanning Black rhetoric, education, oral traditions, language, and life for college and graduate students; and I have designed Black studies/Black Diaspora-focused curriculum for k-12 classrooms and teacher education. I done seen and heard it all, but at the end of the day, I am most honored to have spent my intellectual and political life with some of the brightest and most politically conscious young people on the planet. I learn from them everyday.
Before joining TCU in 2019, I worked in English, Gender Studies, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the City University of New York. I have taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, worked as a teacher educator, and led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning. My award-wining research, teaching, and scholarship interrogate interrogate race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/African American cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies.
Each semester, each setting, and each institution present both struggles and opportunities to create a space for literacy work that questions and enriches my social environment rather than reify dominant relationships between institutions of power and racially subordinated groups. My teaching, in both content and form, for both processes and products, engages an approach nested with new literacies, critical pedagogies, Black Feminisms, and Black radical traditions. This means that I approach literacy as: the space for what people do, rather than what they have or do not have; a set of socio-cultural practices, rather than a set of neutral skills to be acquired according to already given political, economic and social hierarchies; a deep engagement with political processes (we either construct ourselves as objects or we act as subjects who can change what lies before us); and an issue of context---personal, cultural, geographic, and historical.
I have published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication,College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly and more. My book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. I trace and challenge my ideas and ideals about research and teaching at my website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 2 million hits since its 2012 inception.
Before joining TCU in 2019, I worked in English, Gender Studies, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the City University of New York. I have taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, worked as a teacher educator, and led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning. My award-wining research, teaching, and scholarship interrogate interrogate race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/African American cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies.
Each semester, each setting, and each institution present both struggles and opportunities to create a space for literacy work that questions and enriches my social environment rather than reify dominant relationships between institutions of power and racially subordinated groups. My teaching, in both content and form, for both processes and products, engages an approach nested with new literacies, critical pedagogies, Black Feminisms, and Black radical traditions. This means that I approach literacy as: the space for what people do, rather than what they have or do not have; a set of socio-cultural practices, rather than a set of neutral skills to be acquired according to already given political, economic and social hierarchies; a deep engagement with political processes (we either construct ourselves as objects or we act as subjects who can change what lies before us); and an issue of context---personal, cultural, geographic, and historical.
I have published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication,College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly and more. My book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. I trace and challenge my ideas and ideals about research and teaching at my website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 2 million hits since its 2012 inception.
