One Professor’s Winding Path

In fall 2020, Robert P. Robinson embarked on his first teaching gig since earning his doctorate in urban education at City University of New York.

As a member of the Department of Education at Grinnell, he’s teaching a range of courses over the 2020–21 academic year, including EDU 101: Principles of Education in a Pluralistic Society, EDU 215: Reading and Writing Youth Cultures, and EDU 295: Black Freedom Movement Education.

In Pursuit of Ideas and Knowledge

As is common for professors of education, Robinson came to the work after several years teaching at the K-12 level. But his path was not a direct route, and his flexibility in navigating the twists and turns of his career help explain how he found his way to Grinnell.

After he finished his undergrad degree at Humboldt State University, Robinson participated in a summer research program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied Black literature and culturally relevant pedagogy. That experience whet his appetite for graduate school and the ability to choose your own topic. “I knew I would go back to school someday,” he says. “I just didn’t know when.”

He soon found a job teaching in a private elementary school in San Diego, California, his hometown. While teaching full-time, he earned his teaching credentials and then moved to the high school level in English language arts. “I had always planned to be a high school teacher,” he says.

Grad school was still on his mind. At first he gave himself the goal of starting a Ph.D. program by age 30, then age 32. “I loved teaching so much that I didn’t want to stop,” he says.

In 2010 he applied to doctoral programs in ethnic studies and didn’t get in. So he kept teaching for another four years.

When a group of students he particularly enjoyed started the college search process, Robinson was ready to try again. “I modeled the process with them,” he says.

That time he applied to education doctoral programs and got into all of them.

“I was two seconds away from [choosing] an English education Ph.D. at Columbia Teachers’ College,” he says, but one of the things that sold him on the urban education program at CUNY was that it’s interdisciplinary. “I’m always interested in the cross sections, like ethnic studies and English or ethnic studies and humanities or African American studies.” Flexibility within the discipline was important.

Robinson also chose the subfield of Urban Ed, he says, “because it forces us to look at the sources of inequality and the imbalance in power based on race, class, gender, and ability.”

Research Becomes Course Material

During the first fall term of 2020, Robinson offered a 2-credit, special topics course: Black Freedom Movement Education. “I thought this was a great course to introduce students to long-standing Black pedagogical traditions,” he says. “I help students think through ways to interrogate contemporary education.”

The topic came from his dissertation research, which examined the history of the Oakland Community School in California and Black education in the United States.

Robinson had originally planned to do his dissertation research on English teachers and their use of technology, but after doing a lot of reading — James Baldwin, Black educational thought — and taking a class on civil rights and Black power, his interests shifted. He decided to do historical research instead and found a relationship between schools and the Black power movement.

Robinson has enjoyed the conversations with the students in his Black Freedom Movement Education class who are majoring in many different disciplines. “What they bring with them is always so valuable,” he says.