Dr. Harper B. Keenan was appointed as the inaugural Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education in 2019. In that role, he is affiliated with SOGI UBC. His work has been accepted at a variety of peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes, including Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Curriculum Inquiry, Theory & Research in Social Education, Teaching Education, and Gender & Education. He has also written for or been interviewed by a number of popular press outlets like CBC National News, Teen Vogue, NPR, NBC National News, Reuters, Slate, and EdWeek. In 2022, he was awarded a NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Dr. Keenan is primarily interested in critical pedagogy. Spanning multiple disciplines, his scholarship analyzes what schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy teach children about how society is organized. Dr. Keenan’s work investigates the management - or scripting - of children and childhood, and ways that educators and their students might work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different.
These interests emerge directly from Dr. Keenan's experiences as a teacher. After studying social and historical inquiry in an interdisciplinary program at The New School, Dr. Keenan became an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, where he quickly began to learn about the complexities of talking about history & contemporary social life with young children.
Dr. Keenan has worked with programs in early childhood, elementary, and secondary teacher education. He has designed courses on critical pedagogy with young children, history and social science education, curriculum theory and development, equity and schooling, transformative justice, dis/ability and access in the classroom, collaboration with families and service providers, and building classroom communities.
Dr. Keenan earned a doctorate from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2019. He is currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-waututh) peoples. Although he has spent most of his adult life in big cities, Dr. Keenan grew up in a rural community in Western Maryland (USA). He moved to New York City to attend college, where he earned a B.A. in Social and Historical Inquiry from Eugene Lang College at The New School, and a dual M.S. in Childhood General and Special Education from Bank Street College. As an elementary school teacher, Dr. Keenan taught kindergarten, first, and fourth grades in special education inclusion classrooms in New York City. In his spare time, he loves spending time outside and watching films, theater, and performance art.
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Current research: How do schools give meaning to gender?
Dr. Keenan’s current projects explore how schools give meaning to gender, and how young children learn about gender as it relates to racialization. His first published academic article, Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy, appeared in the Winter 2017 edition of the Harvard Educational Review, and was the journal's first to focus on trans studies in K-12 education. In 2020, Dr. Keenan was awarded an Insight Development Grant by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to study the co-construction of race and gender in early elementary school, a project currently underway.
Supported in part by a Spencer Foundation Learning Community, Dr. Keenan is also currently working with colleagues Dr. Mario Suárez and Dr. Mollie McQuillan on a study investigating the workplace experiences of trans employees at PK-12 schools in the US and Canada.
Dr. Keenan has written articles for the popular press about issues facing trans people in schools, including Thomson Reuters, EdWeek, Slate, The Huffington Post, and The Feminist Wire. His advocacy work in this area has been featured in Teen Vogue and on NBC National News.
Prior research: How do adults teach children about violent histories?
This project focused on the teaching of colonial history in elementary schools. By analyzing textbooks, classroom instruction, and field trips to historic sites, the project examined how young children are taught about the violent and conflicted past of the United States. Using mixed methods, Dr. Keenan’s work presented evidence of specific ways that curricular tools manage to avoid the violence of colonialism in the process of scripting history for children, and ways that educators and children sometimes resist that process of scripting. Articles from this study have been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Theory & Research in Social Education, and as a chapter in an edited volume on teaching difficult histories (see writing page for details & links).
The Trans Educators Network
In 2015, Dr. Keenan founded the Trans Educators Network (TEN), an organization for connection and support among trans and gender non-conforming educators. TEN now includes more than 800 members around the globe. Built through a grassroots framework of mutual aid, TEN is organized by a smaller member-led leadership collective of TGNC educators with community organizing experience at the nexus of trans & racial justice across North America. The leadership collective maintains a majority of people of color. In addition to providing valuable support and professional networking for trans-spectrum educators, the group serves as a springboard for advocacy efforts. TEN has been featured on NBC National News, The Huffington Post, and NPR.