For the third year in a row, a School of Education student—Selected Studies in Education graduate Bobby Battle ’26—has won the Renée Crown University Honors Program’s David Orlin Prize for the most outstanding honors theses. It is also the second year in a row that the Orlin Prize winner has been advised by SOE Professor George Theoharis.
Named after David Orlin ’47, a Syracuse University alumnus, attorney, and philanthropist, the prize is considered one of the University’s most prestigious academic honors. A faculty committee chooses the winner from among the top theses in each honors prize category: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/engineering, professional programs, and creative projects.
In “The Miseducation of Black Kids in White Schools,” Battle argues that hip-hop and R&B artist Lauryn Hill’s music functions as “contemporary fugitive pedagogy for Black youth navigating predominantly white institutions.” She adds, “It is also, at its core, a personal reckoning. Lauryn Hill was my fugitive teacher before I had the language to call her that.”
Battle draws on Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro (1933) and Jarvis R. Givens’ Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard, 2023) to explore a tradition of covert, subversive, and liberatory teaching practiced by Black educators since slavery in the United States.
“This thesis contends that when Black children grow up without access to historically Black educational spaces, Black education migrates into cultural forms,” argues Battle. “Hill’s albums, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) and MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 (2002), function as curricular texts that transmit the knowledge white institutions cannot provide.”
Battle continues, “Through close lyrical analysis, historical contextualization, and autoethnographic reflection rooted in my own experience as a Black girl raised in a predominantly white school district, this thesis demonstrates how Hill teaches Black students to resist miseducation, develop critical consciousness, and maintain a sense of self under conditions designed to erode it.”
In the third chapter of her thesis, Battle turns her analysis into practice by proposing both a course and a curriculum for high school students.
“I propose an intensive one-week summer course designed for Black students graduating from predominantly white high schools and preparing to enter predominantly white universities,” explains Battle. “The thesis situates Hill within the long tradition of Black educators who have taught fugitively, outside the surveillance of white institutions, and insists on the persistence of Black educational traditions even under conditions designed to destroy them.”
Battle adds this prize to three other honors she garnered in her senior year. In spring 2026, she was selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Spain for the 2026-2027 academic year; she served as a School of Education Class Marshal for University Commencement; and she was named an SOE Scholar, the highest undergraduate honor bestowed by SOE.
Preceding Battle as recent Orlin Prize winners from SOE were Alexis Wilner ’24 (Disability Studies), whose thesis examined barriers to inclusivity for disabled theater artists, and Morgan Meddings ’25 (Inclusive Elementary and Special Education) who won for her project addressing censorship in US schools and how to teach banned books.