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By Heather Edelblute
heatherb@arches.uga.edu
Derrick Alridge believes having a sense of history is crucial to understanding issues relating to  African Americans and education.
His belief is rooted in his experience teaching social studies and history in middle and high schools in Columbia, S.C.
“If teachers had had a better understanding of African-American history, it would have helped them and the students in grasping the complexity of race in America,” he says. “For instance, in 1992 when I was teaching the Los Angeles riots, there was a student who didn’t understand why African Americans were burning up their neighborhoods, why there was so much violence and racial hatred, and I had to give them an historical context for understanding that.”
Alridge has spent much of his academic career bringing an historical context to education issues. His scholarship focuses on African-American educational and intellectual history.
This past summer, Alridge studied the history of the civil rights movement with historians Waldo Martin, Patricia Sullivan, Leon Litwack and the philosopher Cornell West as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at Harvard University. From this work he developed a UGA class titled “Education, Schooling, and the Civil Rights Movement: An Historical and Policy Analysis.” He also took advantage of the extensive archives available at Harvard to work on his coming book, “The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.”
Like the two men he considers his mentors, Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Alridge feels there is a distinct relationship between activism and scholarship. “Activism informs my scholarship. For me, they go hand-in-hand. Activism gives me the reason to research and write,” he says.
Balancing activism and scholarship, Alridge says, requires conscious effort. “You have to establish yourself as a solid researcher if you don’t want to be vulnerable to criticism about your activism,” he says.
Activism is indeed a defining aspect of Alridge, who served as vice president of the Black Faculty and Staff Organization in 1998-2000 and as faculty adviser for the student NAACP chapter in 1999-2000.
He is particularly interested in improving the percentage of black students choosing to attend the university. “The university needs an adequate infrastructure for recruiting and retaining students of color,” he says. “By adequate, I mean that they must have substantive funds, scholarships and awards. All the other stuff is just talk.”
Alridge emphasizes that the university must “create a climate” that will draw African-American students. “Part of creating that climate is having more African-American administrators and professors,” he says. “Creating the position of associate provost for institutional diversity is one step in the right direction.”
When working with students, Alridge says, he tries to raise their enthusiasm for teaching and its importance. “Teachers need to begin to think of themselves as scholars,” he says, and he tries to instill that concept in all of his students.
Alridge’s goal as an educator and researcher is to be an “interdisciplinary scholar.”
“While history is my main research methodology, I hope to improve or better draw from areas of philosophy and literature in my future work,” he says. “That’s what a scholar should be able to do--draw from different areas of research.” |
