Sonia James-Wilson, Ph.D.
Meet Sonia James-Wilson, Ph.D., Principal Consultant
Dr. Sonia James-Wilson has enjoyed a long and varied career in urban education and the arts for over 35 years. Her experiences include service as a classroom teacher, school director, college and university professor, researcher, consultant and teaching artist. In 2008, Dr. James-Wilson established Catalyst Research and Development to engage educators in the use of equity-focused, culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy in order to increase student motivation and academic achievement. Over the years as principal consultant, her areas of specialization have included program development, teacher leadership, school improvement, school redesign and restructuring, strategic planning, program evaluation, and arts education.
As an undergraduate, Dr. James-Wilson double-majored in music (with a concentration in vocal performance and ethnomusicology) and early childhood/elementary education. She went on to earn master’s degrees in both elementary education and educational administration, and she holds a doctorate degree from the University of Toronto in educational thought and policy studies, with a concentration in educational administration.
Dr. James-Wilson is permanently certified to teach grades 1 to 6 in New York State, and she worked for 7 years as an elementary schoolteacher. Additionally, she has taught creative movement and visual arts to children in grades K through 12, and photography to youth in grades 6 to 8. In 1994, Dr. James-Wilson shifted her focus from K-12 to higher education, and served as a teacher educator for 14 years in colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.
Over the course of her career, Dr. James-Wilson has developed and taught numerous teacher education, school administration, and arts education courses at the college and university levels. She has also published work related to educational equity and social justice, teacher leadership, urban teacher education, identity and arts education, and has presented on these and other topics at over 85 conferences in the United States, South America, Canada, the United Kingdom and Africa.
As a doctoral student and instructor, Dr. James-Wilson was part of the team that established the first urban-focused teacher education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Later, as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, she became the founding director of the Urban Teaching and Leadership (UTL) Program which she based on her doctoral dissertation and launched in 2005. This graduate level teacher certification program was informed by her social justice-focused framework that integrated coursework, fieldwork, and community service into the training of new teachers committed to working within the urban context. Through her collaboration with the Rochester City School District, the UTL program was augmented to include the Urban Teaching and Leadership Academy (UTLA) for in-service teachers. Between 2006 and 2018, UTLA served as the model of three other district-wide, equity-focused leadership programs for teachers, administrators and school-wide data teams that Dr. James-Wilson designed and facilitated in the Northeast, Midwest and Southern Ontario.
In addition to leading programs for educational practitioners, Dr. James-Wilson provided leadership for the Ontario Arts Education Institute, a collaboration between York University, the Toronto District School Board, and the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Canadian Council for Inner City Education. She has also served as the director of the Young Musicians Institute, a component of the Gateways Music Festival which connects and supports professional classical musicians of African descent. Most recently, in 2022, Dr. James-Wilson became the executive director of The WomanHOOD (Helping Ourselves Overcome Discrimination) Project, and Bronx-based after school program for young people across the gender spectrum who are racialized and identify as female.
As a professional development facilitator, Dr. James-Wilson provided services to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ifetayo Cultural Arts Facility, Dream Yard Project (all in New York City), and the Rochester office of the National Aesthetic Education Institute. She has also conducted program evaluation and facilitated strategic planning for various arts centers including Dream Yard Project (South Bronx, NY), NYC Kids Project (New York, NY), Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC) (Brooklyn, NY), and the Flower City Arts Center, and ROCmusic both in Rochester, New York. To help inform arts education policy and practice, she has also served on the Arts in Education Roundtable for the Arts and Cultural Council of Greater Rochester, and as a member of various arts organizations including the National Arts Education Association, the Performing Arts Organizations Network for Education, and the Arts Education Council of Ontario.
In 2016, Dr. James-Wilson developed The ArtID Approach in order to leverage the visual and performing arts as a vehicle through which youth and adults could explore their cultural and racial identities. Since then, she has developed and facilitated numerous teacher professional development institutes, workshops, and units of study that reflect this approach in schools, community organizations, and universities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and East Africa. To help support the work in these countries, in 2019 she founded ArtID International, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization which funds ArtID Residencies and related initiatives making them free of charge for collaborating partners.
Dr. James-Wilson has continued her work in higher education as a visiting scholar in the School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of Embu in Kenya. She is a lead partner in The ArtLab Project which is a collaboration between Catalyst Research and Development, the University of Embu, and Kangaru District Education Board Primary School, and co-director of the ArtLab Research Consortium. The ArtLab facility provides a space for educators across the region of East Africa to increase their capacity design and implement arts-based competency-based curriculum, and supports empirical research in the area of child psychology in order to inform national educational policy.
Education
Ph. D. University of Toronto Theory & Policy Studies in Education (Concentration in Educational Administration) Dissertation title: Towards a knowledge base for the preparation of urban and inner-city teachers: A social justice approach
M.S. City University of New York - Baruch College Educational Administration and Supervision
M.S. City University of New York - Brooklyn College Elementary Education