MY PHILOSOPHY
As an educator, my contribution to the field and to society more generally is through participating in a process of creating quality education. Central to our evolution, both as individual beings and as a collective social and political body, is our ability to learn something. Our ability to be productive social and political participants depends on our ability to apply what we have learned for the good of society. The quality of that contribution, however, largely depends on the quality of an individual’s formal and informal education. Without access to a quality education, an individual’s ability to make a quality contribution to his or her family, community, society is at best curtailed. At worst, a quality contribution is impossible.
Research, Publications, and Presentations
My research focuses on the socialization experiences of black girls in schools. Drawing primarily from visual sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and geography, I take a multi-disciplinary look at the educational lives of black girls.
Broadly speaking, I am interested in how young black women and youth more generally learn about varying forms of human difference from visual texts and from their everyday spaces and places.
My recent work explores the intersections of the hidden visual curriculum, race, gender, and safety in the urban school environment. Similar to my topical approach, I engage multiple methods in doing the work, including photographic, discourse analysis, and ethnographic methods. I have published in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, The Urban Review, Visual Studies, and The Chicago Companion to the Child on issues of place, race, gender, and education.
I also investigate teacher preparation and retention issues in conjunction with the Research Network of the Institute for Urban Education (IUE). This research explores how pre-service teachers engage with culturally-relevant pedagogy.
The central tenant of this research is an assessment of pre-service teachers' development of knowledge, skills, and awareness in connection to their work with diverse urban students and communities. This project has led to the co-development of an assessment tool entitled the "TC-CARES: the Teacher Candidate, Cultural Awareness, Relevancy, amd Efficacy Scale," aimed at assessing pre-service teachers' cultural relevancy as they exit their undergraduate programs.
I present my scholarly work at the professional conferences of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), the Association of American Geographers (AAG), and the International Visual Sociological Association (IVSA). I also serve as a board member of the IVSA.
Selected Publications
Recent Award:
Recently, the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), a nonprofit organization devoted to the visual study of society, culture and social relationships, honored Porterfield’s contributions to her field with the 2024 Anticolonialism & Antiracism (ACAR) Award for Progressive Advocacy and Visual Research (PAVR).
Selected Presentations
Porterfield, L., Frame, T. (2019). The Beloved Community: Exploring Relational Aesthetics Through Photography and Pottery. Paper and photoessay presented at the annual meeting of the International Visual Sociological Association, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Fuller, L., Porterfield, L. (2018) What does Justice Demand of Pedagogy? Workshop Toward the Praxis of Intersectional Justice. Interactive Presentation presented at WisCon 42, Madison, WI.
Fuller, L., Porterfield, L. (2018) Imaginative Praxis in Classrooms and Collectives. Paper presented at WisCon 42, Madison, WI.
Porterfield, L., Campbell, A. (2017). Socializing Black Girls: Analyzing Discourses of Global Citizenship and Participation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Visual Sociological Association, Montreal, Quebec, CA.
Nix, T., Porterfield, L., Cançado, L. (2017). Developing The Teacher Candidate Cultural Awareness, Relevancy, and Evidence Scale (TC-CARES). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Antonio, TX.
Porterfield, L., Nix, T., Cançado, L. (2017). Advancing the Field of Urban Education. Interactive Dialogue session presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges for Teacher Education, Tampa, FL.
