Protest and Pedagogy

Protest and Pedagogy traces how, and in what ways, high school teachers and students sustained and propelled the Black freedom struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia. It centers the relationship between protest and pedagogy within classrooms and the surrounding community of Charlottesville. The story spotlights the resistance of Black teachers and students in the American high school throughout the nation during the twentieth century. Rather than act simply as passive participants in the Black freedom struggle—or outright opponents—Black high school teachers and their students, this book argues, employed a variety of organizing and protest strategies to make schools and communities more just and equitable spaces. Black teachers’ pedagogical approaches in the classroom underpinned protest within and beyond schools. At the same time, Black teacher and student organizing, activism, and protest led to pedagogical reforms in classrooms and schools.

Author Biography

ALEXANDER D. HYRES is an assistant professor in the history of U.S. education at the University of Utah. His career in education started as a secondary social studies and English teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned a PhD in social foundations at the University of Virginia. He is a research affiliate for the Teachers in the Movement Oral History Project at the University of Virginia. He was a 2022 National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and received a 2024 Early Career Teaching Award from the University of Utah.