Dr. Joseph Levitan

Joseph Levitan, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on community-based participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Sitting at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan works with communities throughout the Americas to identify context-specific challenges, culturally grounded methods to address those challenges, and processes to put those methods into action. Through this work he has co-developed methods such as the Student Voice Research Framework, Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development, and Accidental Ethnography.  He currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in Peru, Canada, and the United States.

Dr. Levitan has won multiple awards for his research and teaching, including the A. Noam Chomsky Global Connections Award as an Emerging Scholar from the Society of Transnational Academic Researchers; the Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz Award for Excellence in Teaching from the McGill Faculty of Education; and a Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) from the national postdoctoral research society of Peru. His work has appeared in journals such as Teachers College Record, American Journal of Education, and Action Research. His 2022 co-authored book, Student Voice Research: Theory Methods and Innovations from the Field (TC Press), offers insights into how adults can do better research work with students to improve schools and social systems.