Coles Wins Early Career, Outstanding Book Awards at AERA 2026

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Justin Coles signing copies of his book at AERA 2026

Justin A. Coles, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and associate professor at the College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst, won two major awards at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual convention, held in Los Angeles, California.

On April 9, Coles was presented with the Early Career Award from the division of AERA representing teaching and teacher education. Writing to Coles, the awards committee celebrated his emerging leadership in national conversations around teacher education. Specifically, they highlighted how his “research showcases ways teacher education can uphold principles of equity and justice and provide practical lessons for the field of teacher education, disrupting a false dichotomy around research being either about equity/justice or teaching practices.”

This approach to research is exemplified by Coles’ first book, Resisting Antiblackness in Education: A Pedagogy of Black Youth Aesthetics, which won him the other award—an Outstanding Book Award from the division of AERA representing curriculum studies on April 10. Published in December, the book blends Black studies with critical educational theory, offering guides or “aesthetic invitations” at the end of each chapter to help education workers, activists, and researchers engage with what Coles names as Black youth aesthetics—the “insurgent literacies that shape survival and self-definition, challenging systems that continuously attempt to deny Black humanity.”

As Coles explains in Resisting Antiblackness, those systems include K–12 schools and other educational institutions in the United States.

“Educators should understand antiblackness as structural, embedded in the ways schools and society limit the potential of some children while uplifting the potential of others,” says Coles. “But we must also understand how we are trained to misperceive Black students and the cultural gifts they bring to our classrooms: their aesthetics. Learning to engage with these aesthetics can prepare educators to engage in teaching and learning processes that move beyond anti-Black logics.”

In the book, Coles draws on three studies conducted over the course of eight years with small groups of high school students in Philadelphia, New York City, and on Zoom with students across the country. Out of his interactions with these students and his own theoretical practice, he constructs a framework of Black love-aesthetics, that “intertwines love and aesthetics as reparative practices for Black life” and forms the foundation for a set of teaching approaches to help educators resist antiblackness in the classroom, laid out in the book.

“The Black reparative love-aesthetics framework reflects a deep honoring of Black student resistance,” says Kyle Chong, chair of the awards committee and postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University. “The book’s fusion of theory, narrative, and invitation models a form of scholarly care that [is liberatory] and makes a significant contribution to Black educational thought and practice.”

“I am deeply honored to receive these two awards from AERA and to be recognized as part of a legacy of many scholars whose critical and innovative work continues to push the fields in new directions while remaining grounded in the histories of curriculum and teaching,” says Coles. “Both are necessary as we navigate sociopolitical contexts without losing sight of the harms and possibilities that have shaped education in the past.”

Coles is an associate professor of social justice education in the Department of Student Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education, and the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Within the college, he also serves as the director of arts, culture, and political engagement at the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. His research agenda converges at the intersections of critical race studies, urban (teacher) education, language & literacy, and Black studies. Recently, he was named a William T. Grant Theories of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Racialization in Research to Reduce Inequality in the Lives of Young People Writing Fellow. His first book, Resisting Antiblackness in Education: A Pedagogy of Black Youth Aesthetics, was released in December 2025.