Dr. Joyce E. King ’69, PhD ’74

Joyce E. King holds the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair of Teaching, Learning and Leadership at George State University, where she is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and affiliated Faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies. 

Her research and scholarship deal with how mainstream American education produces dysconsciousness—a habit of mind that resists a critically transformative understanding of race and racialized inequity. Education K-16 perpetuates a curriculum that alienates peoples of color from seeing themselves as co-constructors of knowledge and distorts White people’s humanity as well.  For example, Dr. King’s research has noted that K-12 textbooks, lesson plans, and teacher preparation routinely start the history of Black people in the Americas in slavery, not in Africa, and teach that Egypt is located in the Middle East or even Asia rather than in Africa! African American learners are taught they have contributed nothing to the production of knowledge, and that abandonment of all Black cultural identity is key to any success in school—at all levels.  Dr. King raised these issues when she served on the California Curriculum Commission. Her scholarship addresses a transformative role for culture in effective teaching, teacher preparation and parenting, Black Studies epistemology and curriculum theorizing, community-mediated research, and dysconscious racism, the term she coined.  Her scholarship emphasizes cultural well-being as a necessary goal in all successful education, including that of Whites and others who are also mis-educated by a competitive educational system that feeds them racially-constructed ideological knowledge as color-blind education.  

Her publications can be found in the Harvard Educational Review, The Journal of Negro Education, The Journal of Black Studies, Teaching Tolerance Magazine, Womanist Theory and Research, numerous book chapters as well as seven books: Teaching Diverse Populations—Formulating a Knowledge Base; Black Mothers to Sons: Juxtaposing African American Literature with Social Praxis; Preparing Teachers for Diversity; Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century; Re-membering History in Student and Teacher Learning: An African-centered Culturally Informed Praxis; The Afrocentric Praxis of Teaching for Freedom: Connecting Culture to Learning and Dysconscious Racism, Afrocentric Praxis and Education for Human Freedom—Through the Years I Keep on Toiling—The Selected Works of Joyce E. King.

Previously, Dr. King has served as Provost and Professor of Education at Spelman College, Associate Provost at Medgar Evers College in New York (CUNY), Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Diversity Programs at the University of New Orleans; Director of Teacher Education at Santa Clara University, Head of the Department of Ethnic Studies, Mills College and visiting faculty in the School of Education at Stanford University and the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. Dr. King has international experience teaching, lecturing and providing professional development in Brazil (using Portuguese translations of her publications), Canada, China, England, Jamaica, New Zealand and Mali, Kenya, and Senegal (Africa). A recipient of the W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship and the American Council on Education Fellowship, she also served on the California State Board of Education Curriculum Commission.  She is a member of the National African American Commission on Reparations  (NAARC).

Dr. King holds the Ph.D. in the Social Foundations of Education and a B.A. Degree in Sociology (with Honors), both from Stanford University, and a Certificate in Educational Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As an undergraduate, she received the prestigious Dinkelspiel Award for service at Stanford. Dr. King is immediate past-President of the American Educational Research Association (2014-2015).