" /> Assistant Teaching Professor, Didactic Faculty
My journey to PA education has been a circuitous one, with a focus on justice and inclusion as a guiding, connecting thread across many experiences and contexts. Living and communing with others for nearly 20 years in the deepest region of the American Deep South, in a community that is characterized by generations of families and individuals facing poverty, trauma, racism, and other forms of oppression, I have seen up close and very humanly personal what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to when he noted that injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane of all inequalities.
I am excited to be a part of the MEDEX team as an Assistant Teaching Professor given the program’s storied history of focusing on fostering equitable health by preparing healthcare providers well equipped to serve and particularly in historically underserved rural and minoritized communities. I bring over 30 years of interdisciplinary skills, knowledge, and experiences as an educational researcher, applied sociologist, and instruction and curriculum designer across higher education and communities to contribute to MEDEX by supporting faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders in fostering effective assessment, teaching, and learning experiences, outcomes, and opportunities and exploring the socio-historical contextual factors that buttress enduring, patterned health inequities.
I have managed and been part of both large and small grant-funded research, supervised doctoral dissertations with justice-education foci, and facilitated community-based workshops aimed at bias reduction, parent and guardian educational support, transracial adoptive parenting, and immigration rights. I have also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in higher education in Social Justice Education, Gender Studies, Social Inequalities, Racial and Ethnic and Minorities, Multicultural Teacher Education, and Social Foundations of Education, and more, in colleges of Medicine and Education, and in departments of Sociology and Teacher Education at public and private institutions. I have established parent, family, and community advocacy groups in Alabama and Utah.
My research interests focus on exploring health and educational inequities, and the intersections between justice, geography, time, and institutions. My work has appeared in Frontiers of Psychology, The Journal of Black Studies, Critical Education, Democracy and Education, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Education, and The Urban Review. I am co-author of White Parents, Black Children: Understanding Adoption and Race published in 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield. If you’re searching for my publications (thank you!) but can’t find me, try including my former surname, Juárez, as such: Brenda G. Juárez Harris, Ph.D.