Kailah Lee McGee Adefolalu

Kailah McGee Adefolalu is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Cultures, Institutions, and Society program at Harvard Griffin GSAS and HGSE. She is primarily interested in the relationship between history learning and adolescent civic reasoning. In her work, she asks how learning non-dominant historical narratives influences how affluent white students reason about contemporary issues of justice. She also explores what equity requires of America’s most privileged citizens and thinks about how to teach hard histories effectively in racially-heterogenous classrooms. She has worked in the Adolescent Ethnic-Racial Identity (AERID) Lab and continues to think about these issues with EdEthics and the Democratic Knowledge Project. Kailah was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. She worked as an assistant preschool teacher while earning her B.S in Learning and Education Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She ventured into curriculum development while earning her M.A in Urban Schooling from UCLA. She now lives in Roxbury, MA with her husband who is a children’s librarian, and Roxxi Gynger, her spicy 16-year-old dog.