Education is a Community Experience: Race, Geography, and Power

 Dr. Jalil Mustaffa Bishop is the Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in UPenn's Graduate School of Education. His work broadly traces how systems of schooling, from K-12 to higher education, sort some groups into categories of value and others into categories of non-value. Dr. Bishop refers to this sorting process as education violence. For this talk, he will present on his latest research project which highlights the role of schools and colleges in sorting Black communities into categories of precarity. The case is a Black neighborhood in Northeast Ohio that has all the indicators of education opportunity but still experiences generational poverty. His findings show how (under)development in Black neighborhoods and (un)equal opportunity in schools and colleges are interlocked. Dr. Bishop argues community-based solutions can strengthen education pathways for Black students if they are designed to engage their communities as valuable. All are welcome to attend the talk and engage in a discussion on the role of race and geography in education opportunity.