Dr. Harris

Tiffany Harris

Assistant Professor

Education

  • Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
  • Ed.M. in Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
  • B.A. in History with secondary education concentration cum laude, University of West Georgia 

Research Interests

Tiffany Octavia Harris is an Assistant Professor of Educational and Social Foundations at the College of Charleston in South Carolina’s Lowcountry region (unceded territory of the Kusso, Yamassee, Sewee, Santee, Wateree, Winyah, Chicora, Waccamaw, Pee Dee, and Catawba peoples as well as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor). Harris is a Southern Black Native American girl from Atlanta, Georgia (ancestral homelands of the Mvskoke and Cherokee peoples). Her interests include autoethnography, culturally relevant pedagogy, Black Girlhood studies, Black Feminism, digital humanities, Indigeneity, speculative fiction, traditional ecological knowledge, & U.S. South. She wholeheartedly believes human survival is interdependent with ecological restoration. 
 
Harris’ background is rooted in her experiences as a former social studies teacher in Atlanta Public Schools, but also as a homegirl with Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), an intergenerational, art-based collective celebrating Black girlhood. Her creative craft draws on ethnodrama performances, DIY photography curation, gardening and hiking as traditional ecological knowledge, experimental filmmaking, and poetic prose. Harris’ debut film, Becoming, embraces nature as a way to interpret Black girlhood through the central concept of node or supporting stem points on plants and trees which functions as a metaphor for world making and healing. She is also a CofC Women’s and Gender Studies Executive Committee member and affiliated faculty.  

Courses Taught

  • Foundations of Education (REI US)  
  • Race, Class, and Gender   
  • Social Studies and Humanities Methods 
  • Schools and Society: Learning from Lived Experiences (FYE REI US)  

Selected Publications

 
Harris, T.O. & Butler, T.T. “I-20 and I-26: Intergenerational Connections and Pedagogies of Black Southern Metropoles.” | Invited to submit for the Afrosouthernfuturism edited collection.  


Harris, T.O. “Learning to Love: A Letter of Becoming via Citational Politics” | Under review for Experiments in Art Research chapter book proposal  


Harris, T.O. “Dreaming of An Otherworldly Elsewhere: A Black Girlhood Speculative Approach to Teacher Education” | under review for the “Science Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Education” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies special issue 


Harris, T.O. (2022b, Dec.). Ancestral plane: Buried in plain sight. Surge: The Lowcountry Climate Magazine. Issue 3. Page 11.  


Harris, T.O. (2022a). The south (still) got something to say: An Atlanta-centric analysis of intergenerational pedagogies. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]. Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship. 


Welton, A.D. & Harris, T.O. (2022). Youth of color social movements for racial justice: The politics of interrogating the school-to-prison pipeline. Educational Policy, 36(1), 57-99. 
James-Gallaway, A. & Harris, T.O. (2021). We been relevant: Culturally relevant pedagogy and Black women teachers in segregated schools. Educational Studies. 57(2), pp.124-141. 


Welton, A. D., Harris, T. O., Altamirano, K., & Williams, T. (2017). The politics of student voice. Conceptualizing a model for critical analysis. In S. L. Diem & M. D. Young (Eds.), Critical approaches to education policy analysis. Moving beyond tradition (pp. 83-110). New York, NY: Springer.

 
Welton, A.D., Harris, T.O., LaLonde, P.G., & Moyer, R. (2015). Social Justice Education in a Diverse Classroom: Examining High School Discussions about Race, Power, and Privilege. Equity and Excellence in Education. 48(4), pp. 549-570. 

Honors & Awards

  • CofC Cistern Standard of Academic Excellence | Office of Human Resources  
  • Research and Development Support Funding | School of Education 
  • Scholarship for Teaching and Learning Grant | Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) 
  • Outstanding Graduate Student Research Prize, Humanities Research Institute | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   
  • The Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown Coalition Award, Women’s Resource Center | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   
  • Smalley Graduate Research Fellowship, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign    
  • Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Fellowship | Illinois Board of Higher Education