Building classrooms of connection, care and resistance
Kushya Sugarman brings nearly two decades of classroom experience, a passion for justice and award-winning research to the Department of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College.
For Kushya Sugarman, teaching has never been just a job. It’s a calling, a community and a place of resistance.
Sugarman was a public school teacher in New York City for 18 years and will join the College’s Department of Psychology and Education this fall. She’ll teach courses in elementary education and social justice. She is deeply committed to her students, has written a critically acclaimed dissertation and has a research portfolio that explores how teachers and children push back against restrictive education systems.
Her journey into academia was shaped by personal experience and a desire to understand the disparities she witnessed in schools. While Sugarman thrived in traditional academic environments, her two brothers, who she says are equally bright, didn’t.
“I was interested in how it played out differently in the structures I was seeing,” she said. “As a Black woman with Black brothers, I started to really question what school was doing for all of us.”
Sugarman earned her undergraduate degree in English from CUNY City College and her master’s in elementary education from CUNY Hunter College. While pursuing her Ph.D. in urban education at CUNY, she taught full-time and brought up her children. “It was hard,” she recalled. “I couldn’t always take all the classes I wanted to, but I needed to keep working for my family.”
She received the 2025 Dissertation Award for Critical Educators for Social Justice from the American Educational Research Association for her doctoral research, which examined how teachers and students resist the constraints of traditional schooling. She started a teacher inquiry group that included former graduate education students. Through this group, she studied what happened when teachers treated students’ “disruptions” as “calls for freedom” rather than dismissing them.
“I wanted to see how we could build off of the resistance we were seeing in classrooms,” Sugarman said. “I asked, ‘What do we lose when students and teachers adapt to conventional schooling structures? And what can we build when we don’t?’”
The commitment to collective learning and justice-centered education is part of what drew her to Mount Holyoke College. During the interview process, she felt that what the department needs and what she can offer are aligned.
“Other places were focused on research first. I was drawn to MHC because it’s a research school that really values teaching,” she said.
This fall, Sugarman will lead a math, science and technology methods course for students on the elementary teacher licensure track. In spring, she’ll teach a popular course on social justice in education. She’s also working on a new educational policy course that is grounded in her research and classroom experience.
“I want my students to figure out who they want to be as teachers,” she said. “I can tell them what’s important, but it’s not going to be meaningful unless they decide what they value and how they want to connect with their students.”
Her current research, supported by the Spencer Foundation, expands on these themes. Sugarman is co-leading a national study that examines how educators are responding to anti–diversity, equity and inclusion and anti-LGBTQ+ policies across the U.S. Through interviews with members of the Teaching for Black Lives network, the project maps grassroots strategies for sustaining justice-oriented teaching. She’s also working on a book with other researchers that examines how educators, librarians, parents and school board members organize against book bans and censorship efforts.
“I’ve always loved informal study groups; they can’t be shut down when funding changes,” she explained.
Sugarman’s approach is not only shaped by her research and classroom experience but also by her family. She is a third-generation educator: her mother and grandmother were both teachers. Although she once vowed never to follow in their footsteps, tutoring in and after college led to substitute teaching, and soon, she fell in love with the classroom. Today, as a parent herself, she brings a holistic view of childhood and learning to her work.
She presented her research in Finland and visited schools in Sweden, which expanded her perspective. “It felt like seeing a whole different way of approaching childhood,” she said. “It changed the way I was interacting with my own kids and my fourth-grade students. I realized this was [a] bigger work that I could keep doing.”
After a lifetime in New York City, she and her family are relocating to Massachusetts, where she’s eager to build community on and off campus. Sugarman is looking forward to building strong mentorship relationships and making connections with local schools. But more than anything, she’s excited to learn from her students.
“Making connections with one another is how you experience a classroom that’s focused on the collective rather than the individual,” she said. “That’s what I hope to build here.”
