EdClub Guest Speaker: Education equality and Race

Join our talk with our guest speaker, Michelle A. Purdy, an Assistant Professor of Education in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. We will unveil her research, teaching, and service commitments to race, culture, and equity in education.
Her specialties include the history of U.S. education, the history of African American education, the history of school desegregation, critical race theory, and oral history.

Her first solo-authored book, Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools will be published this Fall by the University of North Carolina Press. In Transforming the Elite, Purdy examines institutional change in historically white elite private schools with a focus on the desegregation of Westminster in Atlanta and how the first African American students to desegregate Westminster courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism in a contradictory and complex school culture. This book, that takes you from the boardroom to the classroom and playing field, pushes us to consider the racist and racial history of all K-12 educating institutions, how all institutions are informed by internal and external politics and policies, and the continued interplay of public and private schooling options for African Americans.

Dr. Purdy is also co-editor of Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History and "African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power," a special issue of the Journal of African American History. She is also author of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including those that address the history of the John B. Ervin Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis, the intersection of race, social movements, and the media as educator, and the teaching of African American educational history. Dr. Purdy earned her A.B. in educational studies and African and African-American studies and M.A. in history from Washington University, and Ph.D. in educational studies from Emory University. In addition to holding previous administrative, instructional, and research positions at Washington University and Emory, Purdy has also held such positions at Michigan State University, St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Ridgeland, Mississippi, and Exploration Summer Program at Yale University.

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