Dr. Alexandra Freidus

Dr. Alexandra Freidus is an educational ethnographer whose work is focused on racism, social inequality, and educational policy. She is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut. Alex uses sociocultural and critical race theory to ask how educators, policies, young people, and their families sustain and interrupt racial inequality in public schools. Using participant-observation, interviews, and public archives, she examines how community stakeholders conceptualize student diversity; how school and district administrators enact racialized educational policies; and how these interlocking contexts relate to schools’ central work — teaching and learning. Alex’s book Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City, forthcoming with NYU Press, centers the experiences of young people as learners and policy actors to demonstrate the possibilities and constraints of school diversity as a strategy for educational justice.

Alex’s research has won awards from the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the American Institutes for Research, and the Council on Anthropology and Education. Her work has been published in journals including American Educational Research Journal, Harvard Educational Review, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis,Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Teachers College Record, and Educational Policy.

Before becoming a professor, Alex taught high school social studies, led professional development, and supported school reform efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City for over fifteen years. Her professional experiences in K-12 deeply inform her teaching and her research. She currently teaches courses on educational policy and qualitative research to graduate students. Alex completed her PhD in Urban Education at New York University, her MA in Education from Mills College, and her BA in History from Brown University. When she’s not teaching or writing, Alex loves spending time with her partner and their two young sons, running, cooking, and reading mysteries.