Assistant Professor Mica Pollock Receives Outstanding Book Award from AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has honored Assistant Professor Mica Pollock with their prestigious "Outstanding Book Award" for her book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School. The award was presented to Pollock at the AERA annual meeting in Montreal earlier this month.

Colormute considers one of the most confounding questions of American life: when to speak about people in racial terms. Viewing "race talk" through the lens of a California high school and district, Colormute draws on three years of ethnographic research on everyday race labeling in education. Based on the author's experiences as a teacher and as an anthropologist, it discusses how both using and anxiously suppressing race labels (being what Pollock calls "colormute") affect everyday and policy discussions about achievement, discipline, curriculum, reform, and educational opportunity.

More skillful race talk, Pollock argues, is essential to education and equality. "If we have a commitment to achieving racial equality, then the simple act of how we talk about race in schooling has to be thought through. Because we can't improve schooling without talking about it," says Pollock.

Prior to joining the faculty at HGSE, Pollock worked in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights and taught English at the high school level. She holds a Master's in anthropology and a Ph.D. in anthropology of education from Stanford University.

The American Educational Research Association represents approximately 22,700 educators who conduct research and evaluation in education. Founded in 1916 and based in Washington, DC, AERA offers a comprehensive program of scholarly publications, training, fellowships, and meetings to advance educational research, disseminate knowledge, and improve the capacity of the profession for serving the public good.