Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations

School of Education
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Curry Building, P.O. Box 26170
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170

Office: (336) 334-3467
Email: cwcooper@uncg.edu

Professional Biography

Make a career of humanity...and you will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.      - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Camille Wilson Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations.  She earned her Ph.D. in education from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001, and she joined the UNCG faculty in 2003.  Before moving to North Carolina from California, she served as a teacher’s assistant in a K-8 school, taught creative writing and journalism to high school students, and fulfilled a school administrative internship.  She also worked as an evaluator of charter schools and parent education programs while completing her doctoral studies.  

Personal experiences with educational inequity as a youth, along with an upbringing that emphasized the legacy of African Americans who worked, struggled and died for social equality and political rights, deeply influenced Dr. Cooper’s choice to become an educator. 

Dr. Cooper’s current work focuses on social justice education and school-family-community relations.  She is chiefly concerned with integrating culturally relevant approaches in school-family-community research, policy and practice.  Feminist thought and methodologies heavily influence her work as well.   

Drawing upon her previous practice and scholarship, Dr. Cooper is developing two projects. The first project involves teaching, writing, and facilitating professional development activities that promote Culturally Responsive Leadership, which equitably addresses the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of public schools in the U.S. South.   The second project involves extending scholarly analyses of African American families in education – paying particular attention to the intersecting influences of race, class and gender – to develop empowering engagement strategies that both families and educators can use.   These two projects are distinct, yet they are both grounded in social justice ideals that confront sociocultural and political inequalities in schools, and they promote critical transformative leadership among individuals, families, institutions and communities.  

In addition to her professional pursuits, Dr. Cooper enjoys travel, cultural arts, film, yoga and pottery.  Her most important and fulfilling work is mothering her joyous, energetic son Amari.

We must have the courage to change old ideas and practices
so that we may direct power toward good ends.  – Mary McLeod Bethune

Courses

ELC 665    Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry
ELC 683    Engaging the Public in Education
ELC 688    Racial Change and Immigration in U.S. Schooling
ELC 688    Educational Equity & African American Families
ELC 700    Critical Perspectives in Leadership and Cultural Foundations
ELC 749    Doctoral Dissertation Seminar