Sandy Grande is a professor in the education department at Connecticut College.
In Fall 2004, she was named special adviser for institutional equity and diversity by President Fainstein. She served as a faculty representative on the Presidential Commission on a Pluralistic Community at Connecticut College.
She was named “Higher Education Multicultural Faculty of the Year†2004 by the Connecticut chapter of the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME). NAME is an international organization that brings together individuals and groups with an interest in multicultural education from all levels of education, different academic disciplines and diverse educational institutions and occupations. The Connecticut chapter has conveyed this award annually since 1998. Read the news release.
Professor Grande was afforded a 2003-04 sabbatical leave through the award of a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation. As a Ford Fellow, she was working with graduate students and faculty in the American Indian Leadership program at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Grande is also currently serving as a member of the Executive Board of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) and as an educational consultant for John Marshall High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
Her current research examines the intersections between critical theory and American Indian Intellectualism. Her approach is profoundly inter- and cross-disciplinary, and has included the integration of critical, feminist and Marxist theories of education with the concerns of American Indian and environmental education. She has written several articles including "Beyond the Ecologically Noble Savage: Deconstructing the White Man's Indian," Journal of Environmental Ethics; "Critical Theory and American Indian Identity and Intellectualism," The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and "American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indigena and Mestizaje," Harvard Educational Review. In addition, she is featured as an "up and coming scholar" in an interview with acclaimed critical scholar Peter McLaren in an issue of the International Journal of Educational Reform. She published a book, Red Pedagogy: Critical Theory and American Indian Education, in 2004.
As a teacher and scholar, Professor Grande centers her work in the belief that education is the heart of democracy. She asserts that questions about education cannot be reduced to disciplinary parameters, but must include issues of power, history, self-identity and the possibility of collective agency and revolutionary struggle. Thus, rather than reject the language of politics, Professor Grande constructs teaching as the link between public education and the imperatives of democracy. Moreover, in her work with American Indian schools and communities, Professor Grande draws connections between the political project of forming a new critical democracy and the Indigenous struggle for self-determination and tribal sovereignty.