Dr. Kitts received her undergraduate degree in 2006 from The New School in New York City and majored in Philosophy. She earned her Master's degree in Education for Students with Disabilities in 2009 from Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York. She worked as a secondary special education teacher in New York City and New Mexico for 8 years. Her dissertation for her PhD from The University of New Mexico (August 2022) explored the intersections of critical pedagogy in public school settings through an ideological critique of teachers' responses to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She moved to Duluth in the summer of 2022 with her husband and two young children.
Programs
- Integrated Elementary & Special Education
Courses
Dr. Kitts teaches the Master's level course Diversity and Social Justice (EDUC 7002), and the undergraduate courses: Antiracist & Inclusive Schooling (IESE 1010), Human Diversity (EDUC 1100), and a class she created The Social Construction of White Identity in the United States: Institutional Privilege and Interpersonal Loss (EDUC 2105).
Research
Dr. Kitts's previous research examined the possibility of critical pedagogy in public school settings, with a focus on ideologies of whiteness. This path has led her to inquire into the ancestral trauma of indigenous Europeans' rupture with their cultural, spiritual and material roots in land-connectedness. Dr. Kitts is now working to understand how descendents of settler-colonists can begin to heal this rupture and its dehumanizing effects through the Rights of Nature movement, in deep listening and solidarity with Ojibwe/Annishinabe elders.
Dr. Kitts' peer-reviewed, academic writing on Google Scholar.