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College of Education College of Education

Erica B. Edwards

Erica B. Edwards

Associate Professor for Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

313-577-1676

eedwards@wayne.edu, cc8021@wayne.edu

https://ericaedwards.academia.edu

Office Hours: Wednesdays 11:00am-1:30pm

363 College of Education Bldg.

Erica B. Edwards

Degrees and Certifications

  •  Ph.D. Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University
  • Certificate in Qualitative Research Methodology, Georgia State University
  • M.S. Education, University of Pennsylvania
  • B.A. History, Spelman College

Responsibilities

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, Administrative & Organizational Studies

Academic Interests

Intersectional Justice through Education Research, Policy, & Practice

Biography

Erica B. Edwards, Ph.D., is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University. She is a former urban middle-school teacher, youth organizer, and non-profit program coordinator. Her research makes use of community-engaged qualitative methodologies to advance educational justice, particularly with Black girls affected by the school-prison nexus. Her works have documented the schooling experiences of Black girls on probation, Black girls' STEM engagement among those chronically disciplined, and the counter-narratives of Black girls remanded to alternative schools.

Dr. Edwards also narrates the experiences of Black women who teach across the P-20 school spectrum. She takes interest in how education policy affects their pedagogical choices and personal experiences, demonstrating the unique and ongoing relations of social domination in their caregiving work.

Considering the central ideological role of popular culture in Black women and girls' experiences, Dr. Edwards also writes about the educative value of television, film, and music. She co-authored Intersectional analysis of popular culture texts: Clarity in the matrix and has written several articles demonstrating popular culture's role in contemporary social conflict.

As a qualitative methodologist, Dr. Edwards has most recently taken up Black Joy, Rest, and Play as methods to advance education for liberation and looks to partner with Black women education leaders working to re-vision schooling for and with Black children. 

Area of Expertise

  • Justice-Oriented & Culturally-Situated Qualitative Research Methodologies
  • Black Girlhood Studies
  • Black Feminist Studies

Research Interests

  • The Schooling & Teaching Experiences of Black Women & Girls
  • The Educative Value of Popular Culture
  • Race, Class, Gender & The School/Prison Nexus

 

Awards

Faculty Community Engagement Award with Wilson, A., Bradley, H., Miller, A., Reynolds, A. & Edwards, E. B. for “In search of freedom: A participatory action research project with Black girls,” Wayne State University, May 10, 2023.

Kathleen Reilly Koory Endowed Faculty Development Award, College of Education, Wayne State University, May 6, 2021. 

Faculty Scholarship Award, College of Education, Wayne State University, May 6, 2021.

2021 American Educational Studies Critics Choice Award Winner for Intersectional analysis of popular culture texts: Clarity in the matrix.

2021 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Book Award for Intersectional analysis of popular culture texts: Clarity in the matrix.

Nominee, “Foundation for Child Development’s 2021 Young Scholars Program,” April 15, 2020.

Featured publications

“It’s going to go in one ear and out the other”: Black girls talk back to administrator perceptions of justice-oriented school discipline

 Edwards, E. B. (2022, in press). “It’s going to go in one ear and out the other”: Black girls talk back to administrator perceptions of justice-oriented school discipline. The Urban Review. 

Keywords

Black girls
Urban education
School administrators

This study offers the results of a Black feminist project in humanization designed to understand administrators' role in interrupting the over-disciplining of Black girls in urban public schools. Carried out with 5 Black girls on probation and 5 Black urban school leaders, the findings suggest that the approaches the administrators used to uplift social justice were not as useful to Black girls' educational experiences as they were assumed to be. In discussion, the paper attributes the disconnection between intent and reception to the competing demands administrators are subject to in a racialized neoliberal educational context.

Perceptions of classroom quality and well-being among Black women teachers of young children

 Edwards, E.B., Patton-Terry, N., Bingham, G., Singer, J. (2021). Perceptions of classroom quality and well-being among Black women teachers of young children. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(56), 2-27.

Keywords

Early childhood education
Black feminist research
Black women teachers
Well-Being
Classroom quality

Concerns about preschool effectiveness have increasingly led to early childhood education policy changes focused on teacher quality. While the intention in these reforms is to ensure the educational well-being of children, they rarely take into account the impact policies have on teachers. Additionally, child care work is a feminized profession with distinct social experiences along lines of race and class. Black women early child care teachers live in poverty at rates disproportionate to their white counter-parts. Through Black feminist focus group research, this paper documents perceptions of early childhood education quality mandates in Georgia and their impact on the well-being of 44 Black women teachers of infants, toddlers, and pre-school age children. Findings suggest that the call for quality complicates Black teachers’ work, adds un-due financial and emotional stress that takes a toll on their well-being and interrupts personal dynamics with their loved ones. It calls for anti-racist and anti-sexist pay equality as a way to interrupt both the stressors exacted by the field and the socio-historical processes devaluing Black women’s work with children.

Toward being nobody’s darling: A womanist reframing of school culture and climate

 Edwards, E.B. (2020). Toward being nobody’s darling: A womanist reframing of school culture and climate. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(7), pp. 759-772.

Keywords

Black girls
School/Prison nexus
School climate

This article demonstrates how (bad) girl performances rupture the inherently violent logic undergirding exclusionary discipline through the schooling experiences of five Black girls on probation. The paper reveals a clear need for the abolition of suspension, expulsion and school-based arrest and relays a new focus on freedom dreaming for harmonious, womanist, healing-informed school climates. In so doing, it calls educators to nurture the liberatory promise in Black girls who experience school conflict by affirming their resistance, rejection, or indifference to white femininity and Black respectability. Such a move takes us away from perceptions, policies, and practices reinscribing Black girlhood as problematic and brings us toward schooling experiences that invite and honor the fullness of their being.

Publications

Edwards, E. B. & Reynolds, A. (forthcoming). You can’t steal my joy! Practices and possibilities for Black joy in urban education. A paper accepted for publication in Urban Education.

Edwards, E. B. & King, N. S. (2023). “Girls hold all the power in the world!” Cultivating sisterhood and a counterspace to support STEM learning with Black girls. Education Sciences, 13(7), 698. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13070698

Edwards, E. B., Singer, J., & Lenhoff, S. W. (2023). Antiblackness and attendance policy implementation: Evidence from a midwestern school district. Educational Researcher, online version. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221079853

Edwards, E. B. (2022). “It’s going to go in one ear and out the other”: Black girls talk back to administrator perceptions of justice-oriented school discipline. The Urban Review, online version. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-022-00647-0

Edwards, E. B. & Esposito, J. (2022). Popular culture as an educative site regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection: Grappling with complexity through intersectional analyses. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 22(5), 435-442. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086221094285

Yu, M., Edwards, E. B., Gonzales, S. M., Robert, S. A., & DeNicolo, C. P. (2022). Remember. (Re)member. Re-member: Theorizing the process of healing sustaining, and transforming as motherscholars. Peabody Journal of Education, 97(2), 199-211. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2022.2055892

Edwards, E. B., Patton-Terry, N., Bingham, G., Singer, J. (2021). Perceptions of classroom quality and well-being among Black women teachers of young children. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(56), 2-27. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.5964

Lenhoff, S., Edwards, E. B., Claiborne, J., Singer, J., French, K. (2020). A collaborative problem-solving approach to integrating practitioner voices in attendance policy. Educational Policy, 36(3), 1464-1506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904820974402

Fournillier, J. B. & Edwards, E. B., (2020). Liminal pedagogy at the graduate level: Reflections on the doctoral advisement process in a neoliberal university context. The Journal of Negro Education, 89(4), 459-470. Access article here

Edwards, E. B. (2020). Toward being nobody’s darling: A womanist reframing of school culture and climate. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(7), pp. 759-772. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1753254

Owens, L., Edwards, E. B., & McArthur, S. (2018). Black women researcher’s path to breaking silence: Three scholars reflect on voicing oppression, self-reflexive speech, and talking back to elite discourses. Western Journal of Black Studies, 42(3&4), pp. 125-135.

Edwards, E. & Esposito, J. (2018). Reading the Black woman’s body via Instagram fame. Communication, Culture & Critique, 11(3), pp. 341-358.
 

 

Courses taught by Erica B. Edwards

Winter Term 2025 (future)

Winter Term 2024

Fall Term 2023

Spring-Summer Term 2023

Winter Term 2023

Fall Term 2022

Winter Term 2022

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