Profile

Jerry’s scholarship asks what enables us to teach and care for children while 1) working in institutions and cultures that are hostile to some children, families, and communities, and 2) those institutions and cultures are among the primary influences on how we think, feel, and ask questions about the children we serve.  His empirical studies have examined the mediating effects of institutionalized racism, settler colonial ideologies, class stratification, and heteronormativity on teachers’ practice and educational research.  Most recently he completed a ten-year study of a school district undergoing a process of racial resegregation that documented the messages this segregation communicated to students and the difficulty of documenting those effects directly.  Jerry’s research asks what kind of knowledge enables teachers to provide ambitious, equitable, and caring education for all students while working in less than auspicious conditions.  It also asks what conditions conspire to prevent communities (including educational researchers) from adequately supporting such work.  These questions require critical examination of the epistemic, ontological, and methodological assumptions involved in educational research and policy making.   .  In recent years, Jerry’s work has drawn upon critical race theory, new materialist philosophy of science, revisionist pragmatism, Indigenous studies literature, anti-Blackness studies, and arts-based research methodologies.