Meet Venus Evans-Winters! She is an associate professor in the Educational Administration and Foundations Department in the College of Education.
Earlier this year April, Evans-Winters was invited to the White House to participate in a meeting with the White House Council on Women and Girls. Fifty participants from a variety of academic disciplines shared their research on girls. Evans-Winters was the only representative from Illinois State University to attend.
“I was humbled to represent ISU as an expert on research and advocacy on girls in the U.S. and abroad. I was also proud to represent racial/ethnic minority women scholars and U.S. ‘urban girls’ who are first generation college students and graduates,” she said.
Discussion during the council addressed the various trending challenges encountered by girls. There was a group consensus that there needs to be more funding for research on poor girls and girls of color. The White House Council on Women and Girls affirmed the necessity to have various accessible outlets, such as media and arts, for representing academic research.
Evans-Winters has spent more than a decade researching and documenting experiences of poor and working-class girls both in the United States and abroad. In 2011 she published the second edition of her book Teaching Black Girls: Resiliency in Urban Classrooms. Much of her work focuses on school resilience, black girls’ and women’s educational development across the African diaspora, critical race theory, and feminism(s). She has also taught in Ghana, West Africa.
Apart from her scholarly work, her duties as associate professor of education include teaching courses on social foundations of education, educational policy analysis, and qualitative research methods. For more information, please visit Evans-Winters’ website.
