Poet.

Educator.

Storyteller.

“Invisible Woman”

Meghan L. Green (2023)

Hiding behind the mask of resilience,

she occupies a space reserved for those whose strength

is often the subject of pop culture references.

Independence

Grit

Resolve

These become synonyms well-meaning folks use

when they forget her name and just call her

Mule.

Endarkened Feminist Arts-Based Inquirer

Meghan L. Green, EdD is currently an Assistant Professor of Raciolinguistic Justice in Early Childhood Teacher Education at Erikson Institute in Chicago, IL. As a third-generation educator originally from southwest Louisiana, her lived experiences as the granddaughter of one woman who left the sixth grade to care for her family and another woman who earned her master’s degree while caring for two young sons influence how she views the relationship between formal institutions of education and the knowledge one learns from spending time in the world. In her forthcoming edited volume, Daughters of (Re)imagined Early Childhood Education: Reflective Narratives of Black Women Educators in Texas During Covid-19, Meghan uses endarkened narrative inquiry to examine the lived experiences and pedagogical development of Black women early childhood educators. 

Meghan’s dissertation has won multiple awards from AERA including the 2023 Dissertation Award from the Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Education SIG and the Research on Women and Education SIG’s 2023 Selma Greenberg Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her scholarship centers Black feminist thought and endarkened feminist epistemology within early childhood settings, specifically highlighting the diverse lived experiences of BIPOC early childhood educators through arts based qualitative inquiry methods. Meghan’s research interests include the impact of teachers’ lived experiences on their use of cultural sustaining pedagogy, anti-racist and anti-bias teacher education in college/university settings, and anti-bias and anti-racist early childhood education.

She uses multiple modes of representation (prose, poetry, photography) to reflect on her positionality as a teacher educator and researcher within this time and space. Meghan grounds her praxis in her intersectional experiences as a cis Black queer woman engaging in critically informed research methodologies.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Green, M. L. (2025). You can’t take my joy: A queer of color critique of themes in children’s literature. Language Arts.

Green, M. (2025). Shattering broken mirrors and windows: Exploring youth liberation counter-stories through photojournalism. The Critical Social Educator.

Stewart, N., Green, M., Turner, E., & Crowder, O. (2024). Black relational methodology: Sustaining nuanced Black joy in educational policy knowledge co-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16094069241282847

Green, M. L. (2024). Decolonization is not a buzz word: (Re)envisioning early childhood teacher education through curriculum design. Young Children. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/summer2024/decolonization-in-ece

Green, M. L. (2023). “It’s how you’re delivering these messages”: An examination of Black women early childhood educators’ liberatory practices through poetic inquiry. Equity & Excellence in Education, 56(4), 545-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2023.2280857

Turner, C. R. & Green, M. (2023). “My representation is performative”: Black women's reflection of academia through collaborative autoethnographic poetic inquiry. Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education, 3(1), 31-48. https://doi.org/10.21423/jaawge-v3i1a141

Green, M.L. (2023). Building culturally situated relationships with BIPOC children through a communal ethic of care. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-023-01547-y

Green, M. (2023). #Virtually_woke: Using digital media to support young children’s development of critical consciousness. Exchange Press.

Green, M. & Green, P. H. (2023). Witnessing the pedagogical impact of ethnic studies through an intergenerational collaborative autoethnography. Ethnic Studies Pedagogies.

Gowin, M. (2022). Watch out for that twister! An inquiry project. Early Years: Journal of Texas Association for the Education of Young Children, 43(1), 15-20.

Book Chapters

Green, M. L. (In Press). Womanist movements. In E. Blair & S. Deckman (eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Education and Gender. SAGE.

Allen, K. R., Green, M. L., Turner, C. R., Turner, M., Ogden, J., & Stewart, N. (2025). Centering Black children’s worldmaking visions: Considering what it means to co-facilitate liberatory space to freedom dream with Black children. In M.N. Abad, G.Q. Conchas, & V. DeAlba (Eds.), Youth resistance for educational justice: Pedagogical dreaming from the classroom to the streets. Routledge.

Green, M., Mwenelupembe, A., & Ramsey, K. (2024). Parable of resilience: Storying Black women early childhood leaders’ lived experiences. In A. G. Raj, S. Orozco, & C. R. Nazar (Eds.), Storying leadership for equity, diversity, and inclusion: Power dynamics and qualitative research for resistance, resilience, adversity, and authenticity. Routledge. 

Green, M. (2023) Intersectionality. In A. Mwenelupembe (Ed.), Stories of resistance: Black women creating their own seat at the table. Exchange Press.

Green, M. (2022). When and where I enter: A reflective essay on the photographic history of three generations of Black women educators. In I. Bailey, C. Sperry Garcia, & L. C. Sotomayor (Eds.), BIPOC alliances: Building communities and curricula (pp. 77-83). Information Age Publishing.

Books

Green, M. (Ed.). (forthcoming). Daughters of (re)imagined early childhood education: reflective narratives of Black women educators in Texas during covid-19. Information Age Publishing.

Green, M.L. (Under Contract). Envisioning endarkened poetic inquiry: Black, queer, and femme all over. Routledge.

Green, M.L., Padia, L., & Souto-Manning, M. (Under Contract). Making equity and justice matter in early childhood education. Routledge.

Turner, C. R. & Green, M. L. (Eds.). (Under Review). Black mother scholarship within and beyond the academy: Reconceptualizing radical futurity. Springer Nature.

Research Reports, Policy Briefs, and Other Works

Melvin, S., Miguel, J., Padia, L., Green, M.L., Malloy, P., Zhang, S., Reinoso, L., & Vidal, V. (2024). Early intervention equity analysis: Allegheny County, Pennsylvania 2024. Erikson Institute.

Green, M. L. (2023). Curses. In H. Van Rooyen, R. D’Abdon, A. Hough, D. S. Ndlovu, K. Pithouse-Morgan, M. Pete, B. Prince, & Y. Sliep (Eds), Voices unbound: Poems of the eighth international symposium on poetic inquiry (p. 91). African Sun Press.

Green, M. L. (2023). Invisible woman. In H. Van Rooyen, R. D’Abdon, A. Hough, D. S. Ndlovu, K. Pithouse-Morgan, M. Pete, B. Prince, & Y. Sliep (Eds), Voices unbound: Poems of the eighth international symposium on poetic inquiry (p. 90). African Sun Press.

Green, M. L. (2023). Sankofa. In H. Van Rooyen, R. D’Abdon, A. Hough, D. S. Ndlovu, K. Pithouse-Morgan, M. Pete, B. Prince, & Y. Sliep (Eds), Voices unbound: Poems of the eighth international symposium on poetic inquiry (p. 89). African Sun Press.

Gowin, M. (2023, June). “Love is an action”: Our responsibility to trans and queer youth as early childhood educators. Erikson Institute. https://www.erikson.edu/blog/love-is-an-action-our-responsibility-to-trans-and-queer-youth-as-early-childhood-educators/

Gowin, M. (2023). Co-collaborating a smart start towards equitable early learning systems: Recommendations for the Illinois early learning council. Erikson Institute.

Latest Publications

Meghan L. Green (Gowin)

“It goes back to the idea of culturally-relevant pedagogy, and one of the tenets is the development of children’s critical consciousness. We have the research that shows that children from a very young age notice things such as race, differences, and have questions about gender or racial identity. So, how do we move from silencing those conversations and then help them frame them in more constructive ways?”

Contact Me

I would love to connect with you about speaking engagements, consultations, facilitations, guest lectures, and more! Let’s stay connected.

You can also visit me on Twitter and LinkedIn

invited keynote addresses

Filling your j.a.r.: (Re)framing the narrative of resilience for early childhood professionals, Keynote address presented at 2023 Early Head Start Network Pre-Service Conference, Tinley Park, IL.

Filling your j.a.r.: (Re)framing the narrative of resilience for early childhood professionals, Keynote address presented at 28th Annual Early Childhood Learning Institute Pre-Service

invited workshop facilitator

Rooted in testimonio and sankofa: Utilizing community storying with multiethnic and multilingual families, Invited speaker at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee 2023 Fall Speaker Series, Virtual. 

Shattering Broken Mirrors and Windows: Exploring Counter-Narratives Through Photojournalism with K-2 Students, 45th Annual University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Early Childhood Conference Virtual, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Virtually woke: Using digital media in a social justice literacy workshop to support elementary students’ development of critical consciousness, 44th Annual University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Early Childhood Conference Virtual, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Supporting Anti-Bias Education in Early Childhood Through Picture Books, Committed to Kids 2021 Training Conference Virtual, The Georgetown Project.

invited panelist

The Power of Narratives in Early Childhood Education, Conscious Pathways Podcast

Panel Speaker at 2024 Equity Summit: Navigating Equity for an Inclusive Future (Virtual) 

Power to the profession and the framework for a unified and effective early childhood education profession, National Association for the Education of Young Children Professional Learning Institute.

The state of early childhood education in Illinois., Black Voices, WTTW News.

guest lecturer

(Re)defining professionalism in ECE, Guest lecture at Erikson Institute.

 

Poetic inquiry: An ode to writing dangerously, Erikson Institute.