Derrick P. Alridge

Founding & Current Director, Teachers in the Movement Institute

Derrick P. Alridge is the Founding and Current Director of the Teachers in the Movement Institute (TIMI) and Philip J. Gibson Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. A historian of education, his scholarship explores the intersections of history, education, social movements, oral history, and Black educational thought. For more than three decades, his work has examined the role of teachers as intellectuals, community leaders, and agents of social change.

Alridge founded the original Teachers in the Movement Project at the University of Virginia, which has preserved hundreds of oral history interviews with educators whose careers span the modern Civil Rights Movement. Through TIMI, he is expanding that vision by documenting the experiences of teachers from 1980 to the present and creating a public archive that supports research, teacher education, and civic learning.

He is the co-editor, with Jon Hale and Tondra Loder-Jackson, of Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Teachers from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era (University of South Carolina Press, 2023), and, with Ronald E. Chennault, of Liberation and Education: Perspectives on Black Educational Thought (Rutgers University Press, 2026). He is currently writing Soul Work: The Lives and Pedagogies of Teachers in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond, which examines the intellectual, pedagogical, and community work of teachers across generations.

Through TIMI, Alridge is committed to preserving teachers' stories, advancing public scholarship, strengthening teacher education, and deepening public understanding of the relationship between education, civic life, and democracy.