story by Claire Miller
A few weeks after Lawanda Cummings (B.A. ’00, M.A. ’07, Ph.D. ’10) began her role as director of the College of Education & Human Development’s Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence, she led a conversation among faculty and staff about education and freedom as part of the center’s first Juneteenth celebration.
She spoke about how one faculty member at DeKalb Community College encouraged her to earn a Ph.D., and how that educational experience made a difference in her life.
“She changed my whole trajectory,” Cummings said. “And if we can create those experiences for other people, it can create generational change.”
After taking classes at DeKalb Community College, Cummings became a Triple Panther, earning her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology at Georgia State University.
Since then, she’s taught in higher education, published research, and given presentations on STEM education, faculty development and culturally relevant teaching practices, among other areas.
She’s spent the last eight years working at the University of the Virgin Islands, a historically Black university in U.S. Virgin Islands. She began her tenure there as a visiting assistant professor, but soon became project and program directors in the university’s Florida-Caribbean Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence, the Virgin Islands Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research and the Eastern Caribbean Center (a state data center for the U.S. Census).
“The University of the Virgin Islands is smaller than Georgia State University, but it’s an inspirational institution because they have big dreams,” she said. “They showed me the power of creativity in developing solutions. They set a goal to prepare premiere STEM students, and they leverage the resources they have and a phenomenal university community to create pathways for students to achieve.”
Cummings hopes to bring that same spirit of creativity to her work in the Crim Center. She remembers taking classes with key faculty members connected to the center – the late Asa Hilliard, the late Susan Crim McClendon and Joyce King, the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership – and hopes to build on the legacies they’ve created.
“One of the things I’d like to do is to focus on particular luminaries from the center and collect information about them to create a digital collection and resource space,” she explained. “I want us to tell our own story and figure out how to document and sustain their narratives.”
Cummings plans to continue the center’s signature events, including the annual Sources of Educational Excellence Conference and the Benjamin E. Mays Lecture, while adding a new Critical Conversations Series to facilitate additional conversations about education and freedom.
“If we, as a university, are preparing future educators, we have to create safe spaces to ask questions about navigating the perils of the educational profession,” she said. “I hope people walk away with a skillset to address the specific needs and concerns in the students they teach and the educational spaces where learning occurs. Otherwise, we’re not fully preparing them to persist and succeed.”
She also plans to make literacy a key theme for future center activities in reading and technology. She’s made connections with the Computer Science Teachers Association to bring coding and technology literacy to classrooms at Asa G. Hilliard Elementary School in Atlanta.
Cummings believes the Crim Center’s events, research and initiatives can create positive change in the Georgia State community and beyond.
“I hope we remember that the center is a space for all people to have conversations and build strategies for educational justice,” she said. “We all have genius, no matter where we come from, so let’s create pathways for us all to support and affirm that genius among all learners.”