Jennifer Keys Adair, PhD

Jennifer Keys Adair, PhD is the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Early Childhood Education at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a former preschool teacher and trained cultural anthropologist. She is also the Founder and Director of the Agency and Young Children Research Collective that aims to help adults support children’s individual and collective agency in culturally-sustaining ways. She has conducted research projects throughout the United States, as well as with communities in India, New Zealand, Australia, and multiple indigenous tribal nations. Dr. Adair is the author of the award-winning book, Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism and Early Learning (The University of Chicago Press, 2021) along with co-author Dr. Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove which won the 2021 Council on Anthropology and Education Outstanding Book Award and the 2021-2022 Book Study Award from the High Scope Educational Research Foundation.

 

Her new book Smart and Capable: Supporting Children’s Agency in a Complex World (Beacon Press) offers stories and ideas for parents, caretakers and educators of young children who want to support agency but also worry about safety, achievement, and maintaining cultural values in an increasingly complicated world. Smart and Capable arrives in bookstores September 2026.

 

In her academic career, Dr. Adair has received many awards for her research and published in over 50 journals including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Urban Education and Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education.  She is a former Young Scholars Fellow with the Foundation for Child Development, a major grant recipient of the Spencer Foundation to study civic action in indigenous and immigrant communities, and most recently a multi-year grant recipient from the Brady Foundation to culturally validate and test the Markers of Agency tool, a capacity-building, culturally flexible reflection tool that can be accessed here. Dr. Adair currently serves on several national editorial and advisory boards, and lectures in multiple countries. Her research has been covered by many media outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, NPR, Code Switch, and The Conversation.