AERA Division F Leadership, 2025-2026

Vice President Jon N. Hale, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 

Dr. Jon Hale is an associate professor of education and educational history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership.  His research focuses on the history of student activism and the intersection of race and educational policy. Dr. Hales’ research explores the history of student and teacher activism, grassroots educational programs, and segregated high schools during the civil rights movement. He explores this in five authored and co-edited books, including his award-winning book, The Freedom Schools: A History of Student Activists on the Frontlines of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and his most recent books, The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped Americas Most Controversial Education Reform Movement (Beacon Press, 2021) and  “A New Kind of Youth”: The Politics of Historically Black High Schools and Student Activism During the Long Southern Freedom Struggle, 1920-1975  (University of North Carolina Press). Hale’s research has also been featured in outlets including C-SPAN, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, and The Washington Post. Dr. Hale’s service to the wider community is connected broadly to civil rights education initiatives including the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® program and the Southern Initiative of the Algebra Project.

Program Chair Camika Royal, Morgan State University

Dr. Camika Royal is an incisive scholar-warrior, a critical race theorist, an urban education expert with more than 20 years of experience, and a fierce defender of our collective humanity. She uses her teaching, speaking, and writing to oppose anglonormativity, antiblack racism, cultural oppression, patriarchy, and transphobia. Her work focuses on the intersections of race, politics, history, and urban school reform. After teaching, coaching teachers, and helping to lead a charter high school in the public schools of Baltimore City and Washington, D.C., Dr. Royal returned to her hometown—Philadelphia—and transitioned to higher education.

Dr. Royal taught pre-service teachers at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania other colleges and universities in the Philadelphia and Baltimore regions, while she continued to coach and support urban school leaders and teacher educators. She returned to Maryland in 2014 when she joined the faculty of Loyola University Maryland. There, she co-directed the Center for Innovation in Urban Education and led the urban education minor.

Dr. Royal’s debut book, Not Paved For Us: Black Educators and Public School Reform in Philadelphia, was released in 2022 from Harvard Education Press and recently earned the 2024 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. She is a highly requested speaker, consultant, and professional developer on issues of school context-based racism and other forms of oppression through ideologies, policies, and practices.

In 2024, Dr. Royal joined the faculty of Morgan State University, where she is currently directs doctoral studies in Urban Educational Leadership and is an Associate Professor.

Mentoring Chair Vincent Willis, The University of Alabama

Equity and Inclusion Officer Sabriya Jubilee

Secretary Alexander Hyres, University of Utah 

Dr. Alexander Hyres is an assistant professor in the history of US education at the University of Utah. His research examines the history of African American education, educator and student activism, curriculum and pedagogy, school desegregation, and the American high school. His first book, Protest and Pedagogy: Charlottesville’s Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of the American High School (University of Georgia Press, Forthcoming 2026) reveals how African American high school educators and students propelled and sustained the Black freedom struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia during the twentieth century. His writing has also appeared in the Journal of African American History, Teachers College Record, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and The Washington Post. He received a 2024 Early Career Teaching Award from the University of Utah.

Graduate Student Representatives

Darion Wallace, Senior Representative, Stanford University

Darion A. Wallace is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education and History of Education programs. Born and raised in Inglewood, CA, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in International Education Policy Analysis from Stanford University. As a transdisciplinary Black Education Studies scholar, Darion’s program of research interrogates the ways K-12 American schools (re)produce logics of (anti)blackness and structure the life and educational outcomes of Black students across space and time.

Darion explores these interests through three interrelated domains of research: 1) excavating the politics of un/freedom and abolitionism in Black educational history, 2) illuminating practices of Black historical sense-making and youth historical literacies through community-engaged research, and 3) interrogating how the contemporary social context of Black education permits or constraints these Black educational histories and youth historical literacies to manifest in American education.

Darion is a 2023 recipient of the Stanford Presidential Award for Excellence through Diversity and his research has been funded by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Stanford Research, Action, and Impact through Strategic Engagement Fellowship, the Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholars Fellowship, and the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. His scholarship has been published in the Journal of Multicultural Education and the Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education journal (forthcoming)

Callie Avondet, Junior Representative, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

 Webmaster, Jackie Pedota, The University of Texas at Austin

Jackie is a Postdoctoral Associate within the Educational Leadership and Policy department at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to completing her PhD, Jackie received her M.Ed. from the University of Texas at Austin and her B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida. She has had a wealth of professional experiences across the P-20 educational pipeline including roles in K-12 instruction, non-profit management, educational technology, and higher education administration.

Jackie's research agenda examined educational access and opportunity within racialized organizations and restrictive political environments. As a multi-disciplinary scholar, Jackie utilizes participatory methods, like oral history, to produce public scholarship that democratizes knowledge and disrupts power structures. Her work has been recognized at national conferences such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Oral History Association (OHA), the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). Her scholarship has also been publish in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, and Educational Researcher.