Prilly Bicknell-Hersco
“Have you ever thought about attending the University of Toronto?” it asked. For Prilly Bicknell-Hersco, a young Jamaican-Canadian mother juggling a dead-end telemarketing job and raising two children at the time, the question seemed almost mocking. But that moment on a city bus, holding her son and reading those words, would become the catalyst for an extraordinary academic journey that has taken her from teenage motherhood to the precipice of earning a Ph.D.
Today, Bicknell-Hersco stands as a testament to the transformative power of educational access programs. Now in her third year of doctoral studies at York University, she has become a passionate advocate for Black disabled students in higher education, a population she describes as “very under-researched,” particularly in Canada. Her work focuses on what she calls “Black mother work critical disability studies,” examining how Black students with invisible or undiagnosed disabilities navigate institutional barriers in academic spaces.
The advertisement that caught Bicknell-Hersco’s attention promoted the University of Toronto’s Transitional Year Program (TYP), an access initiative founded in the 1970s by two Caribbean educators. Originally designed for Black students who lacked formal university requirements, the program has since expanded to serve other marginalized communities —people who, as Bicknell-Hersco puts it, “never finished high school, never had an opportunity to go to university.”
“I thought, well, I’ll give it a go,” she recalls of her decision to apply. She completed the application process and was accepted into the one-year access program that provides direct entry to Canada’s most prestigious research university.
The program proved transformative. After completing TYP, Bicknell-Hersco pursued a double major and minor in Caribbean studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and sociology. Her academic excellence—she graduated with distinction due to her high GPA—surprised even herself.
“I’ve always been passionate about education and specifically access to education,” she says, noting how the experience opened her eyes to systemic barriers facing non-traditional students.
Bicknell-Hersco’s academic journey has been inextricably linked with motherhood. Having her first daughter at 16 and son at 21, she later welcomed a third child during her first semester of graduate studies at York University, where she began her master’s degree in education in 2021. Rather than derail her academic progress, motherhood has informed and deepened her scholarly work.
“I gave birth during my first semester of my master’s degree, but I was very adamant that I was going to finish,” she says. “And so, I still continued in my program full-time with a newborn.” Her eldest daughter, born when Bicknell-Hersco was a teenager, is now in her third year of undergraduate studies, making her the second person in their family to attend a university. “It shows how education doesn’t only affect you. It affects so many people and your family and how you’re able to pass on the institutional knowledge that you’ve learned onto your children,” she says. “So now, they’re better positioned to navigate these institutions.”
As a Black mother living with a disability, Bicknell-Hersco brings lived experience to academic spaces that often overlook intersectional identities. “Things that speak to our identity and experiences oftentimes are things that we end up pursuing,” she explains.
Her doctoral work examines students with “undisclosed, undiagnosed, or invisible disabilities”—a population facing unique challenges in academic environments. Through her research, she hopes to support these students institutionally and contribute to policy changes that improve academic outcomes and experiences for Black disabled students in higher education.
The academic recognition has followed her passionate work. Bicknell-Hersco has won several merit-based awards for her research, and she is now preparing for Ph.D. candidacy.
“In the intersectional approach to her work, Prilly is paying attention to getting at the complex, multilayered, and varying factors that need to be examined if we are to effectively help these Black youth to successfully attain the academic outcomes they desire,” says her mentor, Dr. Carl James, who holds the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University.
Bicknell-Hersco’s commitment to educational access extends beyond her research into her teaching practice. She instructs Black studies courses at York University for primarily Black student populations of roughly 200 students annually, covering “historical and contemporary issues of Black life in the Americas, in the U.S., in the Caribbean, and we talk about its implications to us and our own experiences.”
Perhaps most meaningfully, she has returned to teach in the Transitional Year Program that launched her academic career.
“It was a full circle moment to be able to go back and teach the same student body that I once was,” she says. Teaching academic writing and English composition with an “anti-oppressive social justice orientation,” she provides visible proof to current TYP students that educational advancement is possible despite systemic barriers.
As Bicknell-Hersco progresses through her doctoral studies, she envisions a future in academia pursuing a tenure-track position while continuing to pursue her research.
For students considering graduate school but facing uncertainty or fear, her advice is straightforward: “Apply and go for it. Nobody ever has it all figured out in the beginning.”
