Featured Member: Calista Kelly on HBCU CONNECT!

Connect with Calista

• Email Me or Poke Me
• Interview Me
• Send Group Invite
• Add To Favorites
• Block This Member
• Send Friend Request

Uploads

Upload Content | Show More

Connections

more-->

Recent Visitors

more-->

More Members

more-->

Q&A With Calista Kelly

(interview me)

Calista Kelly
Doctoral Student, Claremont Graduate University
Location: Claremont, CA United States
Joined: Sep 7th, 2013

About (request update)

I was born and reared in metro Atlanta, Georgia, more specifically in the suburbs of College Park, Georgia where I remained for the first twenty-four years of my life. I attended Fulton County public schools: Love T. Nolan (K-4) and Woodland Elementary (5) schools, Crabapple Middle School, and Tri-Cities High School; and I participated in many extracurricular activities like the Debate Team, the Spanish, Science, and Drama clubs, and the Student Government Association. Among other things, I was a student in the Visual and Performing Arts Magnet program at Tri-Cities and an honors student.

I enrolled at Paine College, a small, private historically black college in Augusta, Georgia after I graduated from high school. I declared a major in Journalism and then later changed it to English in the middle of my sophomore year to fit into my new scholastic identity as a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate fellow. I worked with the student and pre-alumni councils, held class offices as the freshman and senior class presidents, and continued performing in and outside of the theater department. I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts degree in English as the Salutatorian of my class and went on to enroll at Purdue University.

In the Fall of 2007, I began my Master of Arts degree program in English Language and Linguistics and continued my undergraduate research on African American Vernacular English and its use/non-use in the English composition classrooms at a particular historically black institution. I argued that English instructors could be committing "educational malpractice" (Baugh 1999) in their rejection or voluntary ignorance of a legitimate, linguistic system linked to African Americans, and thus, were contributing to the failure of black students at the institution due to students' assessments on mandatory, institution-wide writing exams, which students have to take in order to graduate (see CV link to view publications).

I decided to take two years off before pursuing a Ph.D. and was hired as an adjunct professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, where I taught introductory composition and reading, and as a 5th-8th grade group leader at EducationWorks, Incorporated, a non-profit organization seeking to provide health- and education-related resources to low-income families.

In 2011, I enrolled in the Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies (POLS) Master's degree program at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and completed the program in June 2012. Currently, I am enrolled in the PhD Teaching/Learning/Culture program at the Claremont Graduate University where I hope to teach at the collegiate level and later become a university administrator once I have completed my program.

Education (request update)

Paine College class of 2007

Undergrad Major: English

Claim To Fame:

Named head researcher for electronic portfolio research project at Stanford University (2013); nominated president of the Black Graduate Student Association, Claremont Graduate University chapter (2013); awarded NASPA-Student Affairs research grant (2012)