Gretchen Givens Generett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foundations and Leadership and the Director of the UCEA Center for Educational Leadership and Social Justice at Duquesne University. She has served in various leadership roles including the Community Partnership Fellow at the Center for Urban Education in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Generett is working to enhance the preparation of justice oriented educators and professional helpers. She does this by working across the boundaries of schools, the academy, and communities to create experiential learning processes for adults that enhance the skills and habits of mind necessary to work across racial and class differences. From her earliest experiences as a student at Spelman College to her doctoral work in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Generett’s work has been to better understand the complex relationship that African Americans have to the American educational system.  Her professional work creates learning environments that support adult development by creating learning experiences that are generative and not dependent, where resources that serve disempowered groups are co-created, and where relationships are built with communities through actions that break down barriers to deeper understandings of group processes. This work is dynamic, multi-faceted and complex, and is the basis for her research.

Dr. Generett has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes in the field of education. Her chapter “Barriers to Transformative Collaboration for Justice within Cross-Cultural Communities” co-authored with Dr. Mark Hicks, the Angus MacLean Professor of Religious Education at Meadville Lombard Theological School, is a seminal piece that uses personal narrative as a critical component of working for justice across differences. Dr. Generett is also the co-editor of the book Black Women in the Field: Experiences Understanding Ourselves and Others through Qualitative Research published by Hampton Press and has served as the guest editor for the journals including Educational Foundations, Educational Studies, and Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership.