Rhonda Baynes Jeffries began her career at Alamance Community College assisting adults in GED and basic education. She has served in the capacity of minority recruitment coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in cultural foundations and urban education. She is associate professor of curriculum studies in the Department of Instruction & Teacher Education and a faculty fellow with the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Jeffries currently teaches in the areas of curriculum and diversity in education, staff development and qualitative research methods. Her research interests include school desegregation and de-tracking, power and equity in schools and communities, culturally appropriate pedagogies, and performance theory in education. She is the author of Performance Traditions among African American Teachers and is co-editor of Black Women in the Field: Experiencing Ourselves and Others through Qualitative Research, as well as numerous other articles and chapters in her area of research.