Vincent Price received his PhD in teacher education with a focus on the teaching of black literature, having already received an MS in teacher education from UT. He came to us from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he earned his BA in English, with a minor in French. He is looking forward to taking what he has learned here at Rocky Top to high schools in Beaumont, Texas.
He knew early on that he was going to go to graduate school but took time after receiving his undergraduate degree to teach at the high-school level in his hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi. During the four-and-a-half years he spent teaching in grades 9–12, he strove to bring black literature into the classroom whenever possible. This passion for increasing the amount of black literature taught in schools has clearly been a major theme throughout his master’s and PhD research programs.
While in his graduate program at UT, Price published a paper in the journal Changing English, titled “Flipping the Coin: Towards a Double-Faced Approach to Teaching Black Literature in Secondary English Classrooms.” He has also presented at events such as the New Directions in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Conference and at the Literacy Research Association’s 66th annual conference as part of the Critical Race Theory Study Group. He served as the public relations officer for the Multicultural Graduate Student Organization from 2014 to 2016 and remains an active member.
By his own admission, Price enjoys expanding his comfort zone. He earned first place in the 2017 3MT competition at UT and went on to receive the People’s Choice Award at the regional competition. He began taking ballroom dance classes during his master’s program and has expanded his repertoire during his PhD program, learning tango, salsa, bachata, and tap dancing. Adding Spanish, piano, and skating to his list of new endeavors, Price finds many ways to balance his work with a discovery of what else life has to challenge him.