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Zoe Burkholder

Professor, Educational Foundations

Email:
burkholderz@montclair.edu
Phone:
973-655-3481
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Zoë Burkholder, Ph.D.
Professor of Educational Foundations
Founding Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project

Facebook: @MSUHumanRights
Twitter: @zoeburk

Office: University Hall, room 2137
Email: burkholderz@montclair.edu


Zoë Burkholder is a professor of educational foundations and the founding director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project in the College of Education and Human Services at Montclair State University. She is an historian of education with expertise in antiracist education, school integration, the social construction of race in schools, and educational activism among Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American communities.

Her most recent book, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North (Oxford University Press, 2021) analyzes debates within northern Black communities over the question of whether school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools provides the best strategy to equalize public education. In Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education (University of Chicago Press, 2021) she investigates the relationship between school integration and educational equality among African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx communities. Her first book, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954 (Oxford University Press, 2011) documents how teachers influenced the social construction of race in America, and uncovers the nation’s first antiracist curriculum developed by anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict during World War II.

Burkholder has a Ph.D. in the history of education from New York University, a M.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Archaeology from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She runs antiracist and anti-bias professional development workshops for K-12 teachers on topics such as the Holocaust, Black history, Native American history, Asian American and Pacific Islander history, and LGBTG+ history, and trains undergraduate students in human rights education. She may be reached at burkholderz@montclair.edu.


BOOKS:

An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/an-african-american-dilemma-9780190605131?prevSortField=1&facet_narrowbybinding_facet=Hardcover&sortField=8&resultsPerPage=100&start=0&lang=en&cc=us

Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education. co-authored with Dr. Lawrence Blum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo90478543.html

Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/color-in-the-classroom-9780199751723?cc=us&lang=en&;

SELECT JOURNAL ARTICLES:

"From the Diffusion of Knowledge to the Cultivation of Agency: A Short History of Civic Education Policy and Practice in the United States," (with Nancy Beadie) National Academy of Education Civic Reasoning and Discourse Project, April 2021. https://naeducation.org/naed-civic-reasoning-and-discourse-draft-chapters/

“The Perils of Integration: Conflicting Northern Black Responses to the Coleman Report in the Black Power Era, 1966-1974,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2017): 579-90.

“Integrated Out of Existence: African American Debates over School Integration versus Separation at the Bordentown School in New Jersey, 1886-1955,” Journal of Social History 51, no. 1 (2017): 47-79.

“’A War of Ideas’: The Rise of Conservative Teachers in Wartime New York City, 1938-1946,” History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2015): 218-43.

“’Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization’: Black Teachers and the Social Construction of Race, 1929-1954,” Journal of Social History, 46, no. 2 (2012): 335-63.

“Can Anthropology Improve Antiracist Education,” Anthropology Now 3, no. 3 (2011): 36-46.

“From Wops and Dagoes and Hunkies to ‘Caucasian’: Changing Racial Discourse in American Classrooms during World War II,” History of Education Quarterly 50, no.3 (2010) 359-89.

“From Forced Tolerance to Forced Busing: Wartime Intercultural Education and the Rise of Black Educational Activism in Boston, 1943-1965,” Harvard Educational Review 80, no. 3 (2010): 293-326.





Specialization

History of U.S. education, racial equality in public schools, educational policy, school desegregation, antiracist education, African American educational history, social construction of race in schools.