Lyiscott Named Dean’s Leadership Fellow

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The College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced Associate Professor Jamila Lyiscott as its Dean’s Leadership Fellow for the 2026–27 academic year. 

With the fellowship, Lyiscott will focus on forging a partnership between the university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and the College of Education. Her project aims to create pathways into education that attractand support a more diverse population of future educators while strengthening partnerships across departments and with regional, national, and international communities. 

“My work is always thinking about how to nurture the power of Black voices in education,” says Lyiscott. “Faced with the staggeringly low number numbers of Black educators in education in New England, how can we build pathways into education that empower Black and brown students to conceptualize themselves as educators? How can we build solidarity between our community of educators and Black and Brown communities?” 

It’s a project that stems directly from Lyiscott’s previous work centering Black and Brown youth as change-makers for educational justice. In her 2019 book Black Appetite. White Food., she provides educators with tools to analyze their own pedagogy and confront white privilege in the classroom, and to serve the appetite that students of color have for their own histories and identities. Her forthcoming book, The Cost of Code-Switching and How We Get Free, leveragesher educational research to appeal for racial equity within and beyond education. As founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research (CRJ), Lyiscott and co-director Keisha Green utilize Youth Participatory Action Research, a methodology that dismantles traditional hierarchical views of knowledge production, empowering youth to put themselves at the center of conversations that directly affect them.  

Likewise, by partnering with UMass Amherst’s world-renowned department of Afro-American Studies to build pathways into education degrees for their students, this project will address the issues of Black and Brown representation in education not only in terms of numbers, but knowledge and ideas. 

"How can we ensure that we are bringing the ways of knowing and being—the genius—of Black and Brown students into the culture of the College of Education, rather than asking them to flatten themselves to a Eurocentric standard?”Lyiscott asks. “Often diversity is reduced to colors and numbers, instead of recognizing the power of cultural pluralism. This project will help us leverage the unique power different kinds of people have to do the work.” 

“I am very enthusiastic about supporting this project,” says Greg Kelly, dean of the College of Education. “Jamila’s collaboration with Afro-American studies faculty and students will leverage cultural pluralism to enhance diversity in crucial professional fields within education. Importantly, the project will foster improved mutual understanding and create opportunities for learning across these scholarly disciplines.” 

Lyiscott is a community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She joined the faculty of the College of Education in 2017, where she serves as an associate professor of social justice education and as founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. She previously served as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the highly reputed Equity & Excellence in Education Journal. Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Review of Research in Education, Action Research, Urban Review, and New Educator, as well as several book chapters. She is most well known for being featured on Ted.com where her video, 3 Ways to Speak English, was viewed over 5.5 million times.