Dr. Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. His work has been accepted at a variety of peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes, including Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Curriculum Inquiry, Theory & Research in Social Education, Teaching Education, and Gender & Education. He has also written for or been interviewed by a number of popular press outlets like CBC National News, Teen Vogue, NPR, NBC National News, Reuters, Slate, and EdWeek. From 2019-2025, he held the inaugural Robert Quartermain Professorship in Gender and Sexuality in Education at UBC. In 2022, he was awarded a NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2025, he was given the Emerging Scholar Award from the Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood special interest group of the American Educational Research Association.

Dr. Keenan is primarily interested in critical pedagogy. Spanning multiple disciplines, his scholarship analyzes what schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy teach children about how society is organized. Dr. Keenan’s work investigates the management - or scripting - of children and childhood, and ways that educators and their students might work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different.

These interests emerge directly from Dr. Keenan's experiences as a teacher. After studying social and historical inquiry in an interdisciplinary program at The New School, Dr. Keenan became an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, where he quickly began to learn about the complexities of talking about history & contemporary social life with young children.

Dr. Keenan has worked with programs in early childhood, elementary, and secondary teacher education. He has designed courses on critical pedagogy with young children, history and social science education, curriculum theory and development, equity and schooling, transformative justice, dis/ability and access in the classroom, collaboration with families and service providers, and building classroom communities.

Dr. Keenan earned a doctorate from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2019. He is currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-waututh) peoples. Although he has spent most of his adult life in big cities, Dr. Keenan grew up in a rural community in Western Maryland (USA). He moved to New York City to attend college, where he earned a B.A. in Social and Historical Inquiry from Eugene Lang College at The New School, and a dual M.S. in Childhood General and Special Education from Bank Street College. As an elementary school teacher, Dr. Keenan taught kindergarten, first, and fourth grades in special education inclusion classrooms in New York City. In his spare time, he loves spending time outside and watching films, theater, and performance art.

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SELECTED Recent Projects

Current in-progress book project: Unmanageable Subjects - Trans Childhoods and the Struggle for Self-Determination at School

Gender self-determination has been the unifying demand of transgender social movements in the United States since they began to coalesce more than 50 years ago. The challenges still facing trans youth expose the persistent role of schooling in regulating gender, and in managing childhood more broadly. I argue that trans people are positioned as unmanageable subjects within the context of K-12 schools. This phrase has an intentional double meaning, referencing 1) the treatment of transgender existence as a taboo topic, and 2) the challenges trans children pose to the administrative and social regulation of gender. How might educators embrace unmanageability? What might it look like to practice education that resists rigidly scripting the world, including who children can be and become within it? Drawing on two years of multi-site qualitative data drawn from five elementary school classrooms and one after school program in a large urban school district in Northern California, this study examines the struggle for gender self-determination in primary education through more than 50 interviews and 5 focus groups with teachers, 20 play-based focus groups with children, and over 500 hours of participant observation.

This book is currently under contract with Beacon Press. The research and writing for this project has been funded by the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and internal grants from the University of British Columbia.

Prior research: How do adults teach children about violent histories?

This project focused on the teaching of colonial history in elementary schools. By analyzing textbooks, classroom instruction, and field trips to historic sites, the project examined how young children are taught about the violent and conflicted past of the United States. Using mixed methods, Dr. Keenan’s work presented evidence of specific ways that curricular tools manage to avoid the violence of colonialism in the process of scripting history for children, and ways that educators and children sometimes resist that process of scripting. Articles from this study have been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Theory & Research in Social Education, and as a chapter in an edited volume on teaching difficult histories (see writing page for details & links).

The Trans Educators Network

In 2015, Dr. Keenan founded the Trans Educators Network (TEN), an organization for connection and support among trans and gender non-conforming educators. TEN now includes more than 800 members around the globe. Built through a grassroots framework of mutual aid, TEN is organized by a smaller member-led leadership collective of TGNC educators with community organizing experience at the nexus of trans & racial justice across North America. The leadership collective maintains a majority of people of color. In addition to providing valuable support and professional networking for trans-spectrum educators, the group serves as a springboard for advocacy efforts. TEN has been featured on NBC National News, The Huffington Post, and NPR.