Kailah is an advanced Ph.D. student in the Cultures, Institutions, and Society concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She understands civic imagination and critical justice reasoning as integral to social change and collective flourishing. She has an eye toward the hegemonic qualities of intellectual resources available to students, especially those who are disproportionately more likely to occupy formal positions of power—affluent White students.
PZ Work
As a doctoral fellow at Project Zero, Kailah works to better understand the intricacies of social justice education with White students. In her work, she asks how learning dominant and non-dominant historical narratives influences how affluent White students reason about contemporary issues of justice. She also explores what equity requires of America’s most privileged citizens and thinks about how to teach hard histories effectively in racially-heterogenous classrooms. She has worked in the Adolescent Ethnic-Racial Identity (AERID) Lab and continues to think about these issues with EdEthics and the Democratic Knowledge Project.
Fun Facts
Kailah was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago and is a proud Head Start and Chicago Public Schools alumna. She worked as an assistant preschool teacher while earning her B.S in Learning and Education Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She ventured into curriculum development while earning her M.A in Urban Schooling from UCLA. She now lives an art-filled life in Roxbury, Massachusetts with her husband who is a children’s librarian and saxophonist, and her spicy 16-year-old dog.