Alridge One of 10 Rising Stars in Academe Featured in Black Issues in Higher Education

University of Georgia education professor Derrick P. Alridge is one of 10 outstanding young African-American scholars in the nation featured in this month's edition of Black Issues in Higher Education.

Alridge, an associate professor in social foundations of education, has spent much of his career placing educational issues in a historical context. His research focuses on the history and study of the social and educational ideas of African-American intellectuals, educators and social activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs.

But more importantly, Alridge studies the relevancy of their ideas for contemporary realities in education such as low black student academic achievement and the negative effects of culturally irrelevant curricula on African-American students, notes the article.

In 2001, he was awarded the competitive Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, which allowed him to do archival research on Du Bois. That work will result in two books, currently under contract and expected to be published by the end of the year: Du Bois: The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Study in Intellectual History and W.E.B. Du Bois: Of Race and Identity, Family and Community, and Education.

He began specific research for these books in the summer of 2000 as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard University.

Alridge has also devoted his energy to other areas of research such as the civil rights movement and the study of hip-hop.

As a co-principal investigator of the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies at UGA, Alridge has helped produce four film documentaries focusing on unrecognized and overlooked people involved in the civil rights movement. Along with project director Maurice Daniels, associate dean and professor in UGA's School of Social Work , Alridge conducts and oversees archival research on those multigenerational contributors to the fight for social justice.

One of those films, “Hamilton Earl Holmes: The Legacy Continues,” aired on Georgia Public Broadcasting in January 2004. The one-hour documentary chronicles the pivotal role of the first African-American man to achieve admission to the University of Georgia and later, gain admission to the Emory University Medical School .

Currently, Alridge has several articles in press on hip-hop and a book in progress on the “hip-hop mind.” He has also served a guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of African American History, that will be published this spring.

Alridge's ability to bridge generations and to put together ideas that we don't usually place together such as civil rights and hip-hop is part of his creativity, Aaron Gresson, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University and one of Alridge's several mentors says in the article.

It is also not surprising that among the awards Alridge is most proud of is the Outstanding Teaching Award he received last year from UGA's College of Education. The recognition of his influence on his students and those he mentors, particularly at a major university where teaching often takes a back seat to research, means a lot to Alridge.

Alridge joined the UGA faculty in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in educational theory and policy from Penn State University and taught middle and high school history in both rural and urban areas of Columbia, S.C.

Friday, January 14, 2005
WRITER: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
CONTACT: Derrick Alridge, 706/542-8113, dalridge@coe.uga.edu