Biography

Petra Munro Hendry is professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, School of Education, where she taught for 28 years and was co-director of the Curriculum Theory Project for 15 years. In retirement, her research and writing are focused on promoting public histories that highlight the unique transatlantic histories of education in Louisiana and their relevance to shaping contemporary understandings of education. She is the co-author with Jay Edwards of Old South Baton Rouge: Roots of Hope.

Schedule

2:00 pm to 2:30 pm
State Capitol, House Committee Room 6
Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World 1685-1896

2:45 pm to 3:30 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World 1685-1896

A radical egalitarian vision of the transatlantic, creole roots of American public education

Reimagining the Educated Citizen contends that the constructs of public education and citizenship in the struggle to constitute a U.S. national identity are inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of transatlantic constructs of an educated citizen along transnational and transracial lines. The nineteenth century is commonly understood as the age of nationalism and nation formation in which the Anglo-Protestant Common School movement takes center stage in the production of the American democratic citizen. Ironically, the argument for public, Common Schools privileged whiteness instead of equality. This book suggests that an alternative vision of the relationship between education and citizenship emerged from a larger transatlantic history. Given shape by the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and practices across the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Valley, this radical egalitarian vision emerged at the crossroads of the Atlantic-colonial and antebellum Louisiana.