Pitt School of Education faculty members Martez Files and Khirsten L. Scott will serve as Faculty Leadership Fellows for the University of Pittsburgh Center for Urban Education (CUE) during the 2023-2024 academic year.
"Drs. Scott and Files are hardworking, imaginative creatives within the Center for Urban Education,” says T. Elon Dancy II, executive director and chief research scientist at CUE. “I'm so excited about what this structured collaboration will mean for CUE's mission and collective learning within and beyond the university."
Files is the Faculty Leadership Fellow for Political Education. In this role, he will deepen CUE’s collaborative relationship beyond the university with a focus on political education and study praxes.
“I’m deeply honored to be named the Faculty Leadership Fellow for Political Education at CUE,” says Files. “Eager to learn with communities in Pittsburgh, I look forward to collaborating and channeling our knowledge and communal power for collective action and justice.”
Files is an assistant professor of Black studies in teacher education at the Pitt School of Education. He previously taught high school history and social studies and was an adjunct professor of African American studies and the Diversity Enhancement Program fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
Files has a PhD in educational studies in diverse populations with a concentration in metropolitan education studies from UAB. He holds a Master of Arts in Teaching in history/social studies with an emphasis on social justice from Brown University, and graduated cum laude from UAB, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in African American studies and history. He is a prominent activist and organizer in Alabama, focusing on mental health, politics, education, communal care, and police accountability.
In his work, Files is inspired by the wisdom of civil rights activist Ella Baker, who once said, “[our] major job is getting people to understand that they have something within their power they can use, and it can only be used if they understand what is happening and how group action can counter violence.”
Scott is CUE’s Faculty Leadership Fellow for Writing and Inquiry. In this role, she will lead collaborative writing programming at CUE and deepen the Center’s collaboration with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project (WPWP) that she leads as director.
Based in the Pitt School of Education, WPWP is part of a national network of 185 university-school partnerships focused on improving literacies across disciplines and levels. Aimed to support "teachers teaching teachers," WPWP fosters teacher leadership and aims to diminish hierarchies.
Scott is an assistant professor at the Pitt School of Education and a community-driven educator who centers and embodies liberatory Black feminist and womanist practice. She works across the disciplines of rhetorical theory and writing studies, digital and Black studies, and critical pedagogy.
Within Pittsburgh, Scott is the lead organizer and facilitator of HYPE Media (Homewood Youth-Powered and Engaged Media), a critical literacies program focused on youth-led story-making possibilities that respond to stigmatized narratives of Black girls, women, and communities. Scott is also cofounder and director of DBLAC, Digital Black Lit (-eracies and -eratures) and Composition, a virtual and in-person community offering writing support for Black scholars.
Additionally, Scott is working on her first book, which explores historically Black colleges and universities and their survival within US higher education. Her work can be found in Kairos, Prose Studies, the Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric, Mobility in Work in Composition, Bridging the Gap: Multimodality in Theory and Practice and Kentucky Teacher Education Journal.