Hailing from DeKalb County, Georgia, Jacques P. Lesure recently earned his PhD in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation, titled “Making Extraordinary Men: Race Leadership Education in a Nonprofit Collegiate Black Male Initiative,” uses critical ethnography to explore how race, gender, and politics shape nonprofit leadership training for Black men.
“I’ve personally participated in many programs that were designed to shape diverse students into emerging ‘leaders’ across a variety of sectors/industries as early as high school,” Lesure said. “As I began developing my own politics and worldviews around social justice, I found myself more sensitive to the motives and approaches of these programs, especially as it pertained to creating good and ideal citizens.”
Lesure focused his research on three stakeholders at a nonprofit D.C. summer program for Black men: current students, former students, and program staff and volunteers. He found that individuals flattened their ethnic or political differences in favor of personal or collective gain, programs utilized a pedagogy of exposure to instruct students, and Black men were willing to organize around progressive gender and sexual politics.
“I believe that my work will have implications for how we design, implement, and evaluate policies and initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Black masculine people and those who exist in community with them.”
Though Lesure still has research from his dissertation he wants to explore, in the future he hopes to investigate how the themes from his study on “high-achieving” collegiate Black men apply to Black men who lead prison and re-entry education.
“I want to continue to produce rigorous and compelling research. I plan to continue to develop timely courses relevant to topics and issues. I also plan to evaluate programs and initiatives as a trained culturally responsive and equitable evaluator.”
As a Visiting Assistant Professor, Lesure will be responsible for teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The undergraduate course he will offer this fall is titled "Critical Black Masculinities and Education."
“My goal is for students [enrolled in this course] to start thinking more expansively about Black masculinity, how it's shaped, and how it's experienced by Black cisgender, 'queer', and transmasculine men in educational spaces,” he said. “In the spring, I hope to teach a community-engaged course that introduces students to Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation as a methodology for assessing educational policy implementation.”
For master’s students in the Urban Education Policy program, Lesure will teach “Race and Democracy in Urban Education Policy.” Students in this course engage with theories of democracy and theories of race, and analyze major education policy debates such as school desegregation, school finance, teacher evaluation, curriculum development standards, accountability, educator policies (collective bargaining, certification), special education, and the current policy landscape.
“I’m excited to rethink what constitutes the ‘urban’ as issues of poverty and displacement continue to reshape not only urban education but urban geographies more broadly,” Lesure said.
“I look forward to engaging everybody around their unique experiences, which when put together, are our best teachers.”
Welcome, Professor Lesure!