Alexandra Freidus

Assistant Professor

Expertise: Educational Leadership

Educational Leadership

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Title:

Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership

Academic Degrees:

Ph.D., Urban Education, New York University, 2018
MA, Education, Mills College, 2007
BA, History, Brown University, 1998

Biography:

Alexandra Freidus joins the Department of Educational Leadership from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Her research interests include school integration, youth organizing, and diverse classrooms.

“My scholarship asks what roles educators, policymakers, families, and young people play in sustaining and interrupting these racialized patterns in K-12 schools,” Freidus says. “I use lenses from Critical Race Theory, cultural sociology, and the anthropology of education to unravel these relationships, examining how community stakeholders conceptualize student diversity, how school and district administrators enact educational policy, and how these local contexts relate to schools’ central work – teaching and learning.”

Freidus earned her Ph.D. in urban education in 2018 from New York University. She served previously for five years as a high school teacher in California, and also led professional development in urban schools in both California and New York.

Honors and Awards:

National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship

Council on Anthropology and Education/Studies in Educational Ethnography Award

Fahs-Beck Fund for Social Research Dissertation Scholar

Selected Publications:

Freidus, A. (2020). “Problem Children and Children with Problems: Discipline and Innocence in a Gentrifying Elementary School.” Harvard Educational Review 90(4): 550-572. doi: 10.17763/1943-5045-90.4.550

Freidus, A. (2020). “Modes of Belonging: Debating School Demographics in Gentrifying New York.” American Educational Research Journal 57(2): 808-839. doi: 10.3102/0002831219863372

Freidus, A. (2020). ““I Didn’t Have a Lesson’: Politics and Pedagogy in a Diversifying Middle School.” Teachers College Record 122(7).

Freidus, A. (2019). “‘A Great School Benefits Us All’: Advantaged Parents and the Gentrification of an Urban Public School.” Urban Education 54(8): 1121-1128. doi: 10.1177/0042085916636656 

Freidus, A. & Noguera, P. (2017). “Making Difference Matter: Teaching and Learning in Desegregated Classrooms.” The Teacher Educator 52 (2): 99-113. doi: 10.1080/08878730.2017.1294925 

Freidus, A. & Noguera, P. (2015). “From ‘Good Will’ to ‘Anachronism’: School Desegregation in an Era of Shifting Demographics, Racial Discourse, and Conceptions of the Public Good.” Humanity and Society 39 (3): 1-25. doi: 10.1177/0160597615601716