Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker began her trajectory into education believing she wanted to be a journalist. She enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a journalism major but discovered that the field was not her calling.
“I quickly learned that I didn’t like how journalists were expected to write because I wanted to talk about context and they wanted you to be very pristine,” Walker says.
Soon, she had the opportunity to work with students – substituting for a former high school teacher and engaging with students at a vacation Bible school class during the summer.
“I loved it … I derived energy from teaching,” she adds, noting that she decided to switch majors. “I’ve never looked back on that.”
Walker pursued graduate studies in English education and teaching, curriculum and learning environments, earning a master’s degree and an Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Her interdisciplinary interests in teaching, history and school desegregation have molded her scholarship and her own pedagogy in teaching students at Wheelock College, Elon University, the University of Pennsylvania and, currently, Emory University, where she holds the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professorship of African-American Educational Studies.
For Walker, elements of teaching and history are “all blended,” she says, because the research she does focuses on the segregated schooling of African-American children.
