Tondra Loder-Jackson

Professor of Educational Foundations, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Tondra Loder-Jackson is professor of educational foundations in the School of Education and Human Sciences at The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She holds secondary appointments in the College of Arts and Sciences as professor of African American Studies, professor of History, and Senior Scientist and Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Human Rights. She helped to establish and formerly directed the Center for Urban Education.

Loder-Jackson’s research bridges historical and contemporary perspectives on African American education in the U.S. South, with an emphasis on educators’ contributions to civil and human rights movements in Alabama. She authored Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement and the award-winning Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Educators from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era (co-edited with Derrick P. Alridge and Jon N. Hale).

A dedicated teacher, Loder-Jackson won the UAB President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the UAB Black Student Awareness Committee’s Phenomenal Black Faculty Award. She helped to launch and advises students in the Educational Studies in Diverse Populations Ph.D. program. She established the Tondra L. Loder-Jackson Champion for Education Endowed Award to support undergraduate scholarships.

Her chapter (with Sylvea Hollis) in Harvard Education Press’ award-winning #BlackEducatorsMatter (edited by Darrius A. Stanley) chronicles her contributions to a National Park Foundation Women in Parks-funded visitor’s guide complementing pioneering educator Carrie A. Tuggle’s marker at the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and play that premiered at Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School.