Aprille Phillips

Associate Professor

Office: COE B150 | Phone: (308) 865-8361 | Email: phillipsa@unk.edu

Education

PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Background

Dr. Aprille Phillips grew up in Hastings, Nebraska and joined the University of Nebraska at Kearney faculty in 2021 after working as an assistant professor of education leadership at Southern Oregon University where she coordinated the principal and superintendent preparation programs and served as the President of the Oregon Professors of Educational Administration. She has held several different roles as an educator prior to transitioning to higher education, starting her career teaching at an American school in the Dominican Republic, returning to Nebraska to teach English and English Learners at Bryan High School in the Omaha Public Schools, working with high school and college students at the Avenue Scholars Foundation, and at the Nebraska Department of Education as the Student Achievement Coordinator.

Phillips earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Education from Hastings College in 2001 and then completed both her master’s degree (2011) and PhD (2017) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her teaching centers on the cultivation of a learning community and practice-situated research that supports making change to benefit students and families. Her experiences working with multilingual students and with education leaders and educators in a school on Tribal lands informs her work and pedagogical commitments to democratic education and culturally responsive approaches to leadership and policymaking.

Dr. Phillips’s research has two overarching and interconnected themes: (a) how school reform is/is not responsive to minoritized learners and (b) policy as a sociocultural practice in its development and implementation across tiers (e.g., state departments of education working with schools). Her master’s thesis won the prestigious Folsom Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award at the University of Nebraska in 2012, in 2019 she was named a Council on Anthropology and Education Concha Delgado Gaitán Presidential Fellow, and in 2024 her book Culturally Sustaining Policymaking in Indigenous Communities was published by Teacher’s College Press.

Outside of work, Dr. Phillips enjoys traveling, cooking, outdoor activities, and spending time with her family.

Aprille Phillips Book