Dr. Joonkil Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and subsequently served as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Dakota. Before entering academia, he was a high school English teacher and a teacher leader in South Korea for 17 years.
Dr. Ahn’s research centers around leadership as an organizational quality and its impact on teachers and students. He problematizes educators’ deficit-based perspectives about students and is interested in revealing specific practices where these perspectives manifest in teaching and leadership. He also problematizes deficit perspectives about teachers and examines leadership roles to facilitate teacher agency and collaboration with colleagues to maximize organizational capacity for enhancing equity. Dr. Ahn is versed in the use of large-scale data sets, network analysis, and advanced statistical methods.
As a course instructor, Dr. Ahn enjoys presenting himself as a facilitator of student learning instead of a distributor of knowledge. Instead of simply assigning and grading student work, he always encourages students to share their early drafts for review so that they can experience growth and strengthen their analyses and arguments.
Dr. Ahn embraces the rich diversity within Educational Leadership & Policy, the Department, and College. He commented, “I am a collaborator. I would love to work with others to celebrate this diversity and show our students how we walk our talk in promoting diversity and equity.”
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