Brian L. Wright, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Early Childhood Education in the Department of Instruction and Curriculum Leadership in the College of Education and Coordinator of the Middle School Cohort of the African American Male Academy at the University of Memphis.
Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Early Childhood Education
The University of Memphis
Talks covered by this speaker
Welcome and Panel Discussion
Who Are Our Community Helpers? Black Boys and Policing
Categories covered by Brian
About this Speaker
Dr. Wright teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level (masters/doctoral) courses that include, but are not limited to, culture and learning, indigenous and decolonized philosophies/epistemologies, critical pedagogies, masculinities in urban schools. His research examines high-achieving African American boys in urban schools (pre-K-12), racial-ethnic identity development of boys, STEM and African American boys (P-12), African American males as early childhood teachers, and teacher identity development.
Dr. Wright has published articles in Urban Education, Theory Into Practice, and The Journal of Negro Education, to name a few. He has co-authored articles that have appeared in Young Children, Teaching Young Children, EXCHANGE, Childhood Explorer, Gifted Child Today, Handbook on Gifted Education, Psychology Forum, Journal of African American Males in Education, Boyhood Studies and others. Dr. Wright is a National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) consulting editor, Journal Reviewer for several academic journals, and past organizer/co-leader of a special-interest forum entitled Educating Black Boys and Adolescent Males with Childhood Education International (CEI). He has given several keynote addresses and countless workshops and presented his research at local, state, and national conferences. Dr. Wright consults locally and nationally on and about the education of Black boys. Dr. Wright is listed via “Rise for Boys and Men of Color Expert Directory” which is a searchable directory of more than 100 researchers and evaluators who rigorously and routinely study boys and men of color and evaluate programs to serve them. Dr. Wright is also a 2021 NAEYC President’s Emerging Leaders Circle fellow and the author of the award-winning (2018 NAME Philip C. Chinn Book Award), bestseller book, The Brilliance of Black Boys: Cultivating School Success in the Early Grades (published in 2018 by Teachers College Press, Columbia University) and lead co-editor of Gumbo for the Soul III: Males of Color Sharing Their Stories, Meditations, Affirmations, and Inspirations (Contemporary Perspectives on Multicultural Gifted Education – Published July 2019 by Information Age Publishing, Inc.). Dr. Wright is lead co-author of Black Boys are Lit: Engaging Young Gifted and Talented Black Boys Using Multicultural Literature and Ford’s Bloom-Banks Matrix (in press with Information Age Publishing’s Contemporary Perspectives on Multicultural Gifted Education). Dr. Wright is co-editor of the fourth edition of Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Program Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8 (in progress).
Dr. Wright earned his Ph.D. in Applied Child Development from the Eliot-Person Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, Medford, MA.