Elon University Assistant Professor Cherrel Miller Dyce challenged law students to better understand their social, moral and psychological identities before confronting threats to social justice in their careers.
An Elon University scholar who studies inequities in educational systems implored Elon Law students on Thursday to examine their own identities in preparation for their work battling threats to social justice.
Assistant Professor Cherrel Miller Dyce, in a lecture inspired by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Knock At Midnight” speech, delivered her advice Jan. 19, 2017, as part of an annual forum that memorializes the late American civil rights leader.
Dyce’s own lunch hour talk, “Will You Respond to the Knock? MLK, Identity, and Social Justice in Lawyering,” was intended to guide students as they learn to face difference in ideology, faith, sexuality and more in their future clientele.
“Your legal education, plus your examination of your identity, are the twin sisters who create social justice lawyering,” Miller Dyce told dozens of Elon Law students, faculty and staff. “And your identity is not fixed. It is contextual based on your environment.”
The self-examination of identity – social, moral and psychological – for many lawyers will make the difference between rising to King’s challenge of responding to a “knock at midnight,” Miller Dyce said, or deferring to a status quo that fuels inequalities.
A social justice advocate, mentor and social theorist, Miller Dyce earned her doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her Master of Social Work from Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Miller Dyce emphasizes cultural competence, diversity, social justice and critical self-reflection her research projects and studies educational inequities, particularly black males in education and the educational outcomes for students of color, pairing her interest with the founding of service programs at local Alamance County elementary schools.
Miller Dyce also researches ways to prepare preservice and inservice teachers to interact with diverse learners and methods to engage educators with diverse families. She studies the educational system from kindergarten through post-graduate studies to identify a holistic picture of the impact on racially and ethnically diverse communities.
The program was hosted by the Inclusive Law Community Work Group and included an introduction by Elon Law’s Candace Washington L’17, president of the Black Law Student Association.