Riley Drake, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of School Counseling in the Department of Counseling, Rehabilitation, and Human Services. A former elementary school and family counselor in Iowa, Riley brings over a decade of direct practice to her academic work. She holds a B.S. in Psychology from Truman State University, M.S. in Counseling from Drake University, M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from Iowa State University, and Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies of Education, with a concentration in Education for Social Justice, from Iowa State University.
Riley is committed to 鈥渆ducation as the practice of freedom,鈥 and her research explores how educators, particularly school counselors, honor and struggle alongside young people, families, and community organizers in the movement for abolition. Specifically, Riley 黑料社区. scholarship challenges school counselors to reckon with the ways the profession has been shaped by surveillance, control, and compliance, and to build community-based approaches and practices rooted in abolitionist care, mutual aid, solidarity, transformative justice, and collective liberation. She is the author of Abolition in School Counseling: Practicing Liberation and Community in PK-12 Schools, with Alicia Oglesby (Routledge, Equity & Social Justice in Education Series, 2026). Her peer-reviewed publications appear in journals including Race Ethnicity and Education, Professional School Counseling, Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, Journal of Career and Technical Education, Urban Education, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, among others. She has also co-produced multiple zines with the Abolitionist School Counseling Collective and has written for practitioner audiences through Learning for Justice and Language Arts.
In the Chippewa Valley and beyond, Riley practices community-engaged commitments to transformative justice. She is an Abolition Accountability Facilitator and Action Mobilization Team member with Showing Up for Racial Justice-Twin Cities (SURJ-TC), a network that organizes white people through political education and direct action in solidarity with BIPOC-led movements to end white supremacy, and collaborates with organizations building non-carceral, consent-based alternatives to mental health services. Earlier community organizing work includes co-founding the Anti-Racism Collaborative of Ames and Activists for Educational Justice at Iowa State University. These commitments directly inform how she prepares school counseling students to enter communities as advocates and organizers rather than merely service providers.
Reference:
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.