Dixson joins College of Education as new department head

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Adrienne Dixson, executive director of the Education and Civil Rights Initiative (ECRI), and a professor of educational leadership studies at the University of Kentucky, has been named as the new head of the Department of Education Policy Studies (EPS) in the Penn State College of Education, effective July 1.

She succeeds Kevin Kinser, who will continue in his role as professor and senior scientist of higher education.

“I am honored, proud and excited about the opportunity to work in a college that is leading the way in educational equity,” Dixson said.

Dixson comes to the College of Education with a passion for research that impacts social justice and educational equity. ECRI is focused on engaging in high quality, rigorous research that examines educational equity, providing rapid response public scholarship that can inform a broader public on timely and contemporary educational issues. Her own research primarily focuses on how race, class and gender intersect and impact educational equity in urban schooling contexts.

“Dr. Dixson is a dynamic and visionary scholar-leader who is deeply committed to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging,” said Kim Lawless, dean of the Penn State College of Education. “In addition to being a highly prolific researcher and author, she has used research-informed practices to build equity-minded infrastructures. We are thrilled to welcome her as the new EPS department head and excited about the new perspectives she brings to our college.”

Dixson locates her research within two theoretical frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black feminist theories. Dixson and her colleague, Celia K. Rousseau-Anderson, edited “CRT in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song," which was published by Routledge in 2006 and one of the first book-length texts on CRT in education. She is also a co-editor of “Handbook of Critical Race Theory and Education." Most recently, Dixson said she has focused her interest on how educational equity is mediated by school reform policies in the urban south. Specifically, she is interested in school reform in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, how local actors make sense of and experience those reform policies, and how those policies become or are “racialized.”

Dixson said she was the department head role appealed to her because she was “interested in leadership at a different level” and wanted to return to a Big Ten university — she was a professor from 2011 to 2022 at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was interim director of the Center for Education in Small Urban Communities in 2013. Additionally, she was associate professor at The Ohio State University from 2004 to 2011.

“I wanted to come back to the Big Ten because of our tradition of research, our investment in research as a collective and in particular because of Penn State’s reputation,” she said.

Dixson is arriving at EPS in the midst of a restructuring of doctoral studies that combines three previously existing programs into a unified program that is designed to provide a wider range of academic and professional opportunities for students. The Education Policy and Leadership Program provides doctoral training for students interested in career areas pertaining to educational policy, educational leadership and higher education. Dixson said she sees this curricular transformation as an opportunity for the department to develop a more cohesive identify.

“When people think about Penn State and educational policy, what comes to mind for them?” she asked. “I hope it will be transformative research and scholarship related to educational equity and policy. How can we take our vision and come up with a collective identity around educational policy and leadership?”

Dixson is the recipient of multiple awards and honors for her research on CRT. She was recognized in the Rick Hess Straight Up Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings in 2021 and 2022 in the top 200 education scholars in the country. In 2021, Dixson was inducted as a Fellow in the American Educational Research Association.