Sheron Fraser-Burgess
Visiting Scholar
- Ph.D., University of Miami
Research interests include womanism; philosophy of education; ethical, historical, and political understandings of educational foundations; and the meaning of identity group membership and social positionality for citizenship, praxis, and the democratic subject
Sheron Fraser-Burgess, Ph.D., is a scholar-activist and academic philosopher of education who studies the ethical, epistemological, and political implications of cultural identity and social positionality. She focuses on cultivating critical consciousness in viewing schools as nested within the societal context. In practice, she is committed to contextualized or community-engaged teacher education and professional development. A presupposition of her work is that a democratic society rightly gives pride of place to diversity, critical thinking, and equality of opportunity.
Since 2005, Fraser-Burgess has been a Ball State University education professor for teacher candidates, administrators, and Ph.D. students, fostering critical ethical, historical, and political understandings of educational foundations in the United States and other traditions. She also just completed a three-year stint as director of the Ph.D. in Educational Studies.
As a visiting scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Fraser-Burgess is working on a multidisciplinary project that focuses on womanist thinking as a worldview. Its premise is the benchmark work of WCW Executive Director Layli Maparyan's The Womanist Reader, as an anthology of major scholarship of the emergent field, and The Womanist Idea, which melds womanism’s spiritual and social components to posit an activism, with luxocracy at its heart.
Both texts locate the roots of this worldview in three distinct strands of literature and scholarship. These origins are in Alice Walker’s body of work and its focus on women’s self-love, love of their gender, and reaction to white feminism; Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s named African womanism, that is exclusive to African women; and Clenora Hudson-Weems’ Africana womanism. Jointly they constitute the womanist foundations as a “dynamic interpolation.” Fraser-Burgess’s research pursues this interpolation as it has evolved in the last decade to further define the womanist idea in scholarship.
Fraser-Burgess is also currently the co-principal investigator with Matthew Missias, the education coordinator at the National Council for History Education, in a three-year participatory action research project with social studies teachers in Muncie Community Schools to broaden the social studies curricula for a racially representative and just democratic education. The project is partially funded by the Library of Congress' Teaching with Primary Sources grant.
Fraser-Burgess graduated with honors in English Literature and a secondary education teaching credential from Wellesley College in 1987. She then earned a master of science in education, a master of arts in philosophy, and finally a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Miami in 2005. Prior to her Ph.D., she was a public school teacher in Miami, Florida, and a campus ministry worker with Cru, an interdenominational Christian organization, in the Philippines and the Caribbean.
Fraser-Burgess has written extensively on the philosophical implications of identity group membership for political society, and particularly as it pertains to the normative aims of education in a multicultural democracy. Most recently, she guest-edited with Audrey Thompson an issue of Educational Theory, for which she co-wrote an introduction entitled “The U.S. identity politic: Possibilities for education and democracy.” Her respondent address for the 2021 presidential address for the Philosophy of Education Society, “The womanist measure for the measurer: Philosophy embodied in Black and woman,” was recently published in Philosophy of Education.
She has previously published articles in The Pluralist, Journal of Thought, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Philosophy of Education, Philosophical Studies in Education and Educational Studies. She also co-edited with Jessica Heybach the book Making Sense of Race in Education: Practices for Change in Difficult Times, and edited an anthology for social foundations courses, Society as School Context: In the Mindset of Emergent Teacher and Democratic Subject.
Fraser-Burgess is engaged in professional service in philosophy of education and teacher education. She is an associate editor of Educational Theory and the Journal of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and an executive editor of Philosophical Studies in Education.
She is co-chairperson of the Caribbean and African Studies in Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. She has also been a three-year member of the executive committee of the North American Association for Philosophy and Education.
She recently started a consulting company, Being Better Humans Consultancy, that is committed to advancing ethics in settings beyond the university and fostering the civic virtues so important to our democratic republic.
