Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Tangela Blakely Reavis
Through her research and collaborations with fellow scholars, she is broadening and deepening understanding of the experience of Black college students—in recent years and across the decades.
Recently, we had the chance to sit down with Tangela Blakely Reavis, associate professor of Educational Leadership in the Kalmanovitz School of Education, to learn more about some of her long-term projects and recent activities.
For the past three years, Dr. Reavis has examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black students’ college-going pathways. Her research, conducted across three California high schools, has involved in-depth interviews with school leaders, teachers, students, and parents. Through these conversations, Dr. Reavis sought to understand how schools and families navigated the significant challenges and inequities that Black students faced during extreme uncertainty. Her work sheds light on the barriers these students disproportionately encountered and the success stories that may be instructive in expanding college opportunities for historically underrepresented students in higher education.
In August, Dr. Reavis was able to highlight some of these findings at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Montreal, Canada. The ASA is an organization of students, faculty, government, and nonprofit workers who hope to develop sociology further as a science and as a profession. She, along with her co-principal investigator (Kelly Slay, Vanderbilt University) and members of her research team, presented their paper in a research session on “Postsecondary Education Students and Systems.”
Dr. Reavis has also been involved with the Black Women’s Alumnae Project for more than a decade. Led by Rachelle Winkle-Wagner from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the project led researchers to interview over 100 Black women throughout the country, to learn more about their journey through higher education to understand ways to better serve Black women across the PK-20 education system. The alumnae that were interviewed ranged from graduates from the 1950s to 2014. Some findings of this project were published in a co-authored manuscript titled “Letters to My Sisters: Advice from Black Women Alumnae ǿմý How to Thrive and Survive in College.”
As a guest for Wisconsin Today on Wisconsin Public Radio, Dr. Reavis was asked to talk about the Black Women’s Alumnae Project, as well as her own experiences navigating higher education at a predominately white institution. “It’s the saying that when one of us wins, we all win,” she said. “And so collectively, we see, throughout the stories, throughout the interviews with women it was important to lift our sisters up—that’s what we do.”
Earlier this year, Dr. Reavis joined the executive board for Project Sankofa, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports Black youth in suburban and rural communities thrive through research, resources, and a curated curriculum. The organization is committed to enhancing the lives of students from middle school through their early careers. Dr. Reavis brings a valuable understanding of the experiences of Black students through her research.
At the 2024 Saint Mary’s Black Cultural Graduate Celebration, she received the Dean Thomas Earl Brown Faculty Award, recognizing her work supporting Black students within the SMC community.