Course Offerings:
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WRPRH119A001-02: Brown v. Board at 70: Unfulfilled Promises & Unfinished Activisms for Educational Equity (Fall 2024) | PUBLIC PREVIEW
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WRPRH130B001-02: B-Sides + Blues Visions: Reviewing Black Popular Culture for Social Transformation (Spring 2025)
About Me
I define my work mostly as an educator and cultural worker from Chester, PA, and hold with pride the more than a decade of personal experience supporting justice-oriented arts, culture, and community in the Greater Philadelphia area.
Beyond my faculty position, I co-coordinate the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized Henry Ossawa Tanner House at the intersection of Black heritage preservation and community cultural organizing. As a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, I support aspiring movement leaders serving communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.
I've previously served in key roles with National Black Lives Matter At School, Paul Robeson House & Museum / West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Philadelphia Student Union, Teacher Action Group Philadelphia, and more.
Research Interests
TOPICS: Black educational studies, Black placemaking, and Black heritage preservation
Collaging my varied diverse interests and experiences, I consider my research agenda across three interrelated strands that altogether uplift the importance of surfacing and sustaining historical, cultural, and place-based platforms to inform the experimental design of empowering, networked learning contexts in and beyond formal education settings. These explorations are underwritten by shared principles and practices, inclusive of: (1) the recognition of community storytelling and archival development as practices of intellectual study, knowledge creation, and theorizing neighborhood futures; (2) the prioritization of experimental modes of collaborative and collective authorship that are consequential (Everett, 2018) and answerable (Patel, 2015) to present-day community contexts, and; (3) the strength-based mapping, engagement, and accompaniment of local heritage sites that serve as anchors for grassroots popular education and freedom-dreaming (Kelley, 2022).
My dissertation, Storying a Black Village Poetics of Landscape and Literacies in West Philadelphia (2023), serves as a model of synthesizing these commitments into a program of community-engaged narrative inquiry, where through the execution of community-based story circles at the Paul Robeson House & Museum I sought to understand how Black West Philadelphia residents utilize oral storytelling and other literacy practices as means to sustain and preserve local knowledges (Rogers, 2023). I defended with distinction and was later nationally awarded the 2024 Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research - Dissertation, by the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age Research.
Selected Publications
Dissertation
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Rogers, C. R. (2023). Storying a Black Village Poetics of Landscape and Literacies in West Philadelphia (Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania). Awarded 2024 Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research - Dissertation
Books
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Rogers, C. R., Muhammad, F., and the Paul Robeson House & Museum (2022). (Eds.) How we stay free: Notes on a black uprising. Philadelphia, PA : Common Notions, 2022.
Journal Articles
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Rogers, C. R., Mendelsohn, B., & Strong, K. (2023). Organizing pedagogies: Transgressing campus-movement boundaries through radical study and action. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 32(1), 143-169.
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Smith, A., McBride, C., & Rogers, C. (2021). Exploring the edges of collegiality: a cross-case analysis toward humanizing teachers’ connected learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 16(2), 202-219. Recognized for 2023 Divergent Publication Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research.